Dust particles on Earth may have come from stellar explosions

Washington: Microscopic dust particles found in meteoritic material on the Earth may be particles that were likely formed in stellar explosions that occurred long before the creation of the Sun, researchers report. The team from Michigan State University (MSU) is investigating whether the particles may have formed in a classical nova, a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a small star which is part of a binary star system- two stars orbiting each other.

This explosion nearly five billion years ago would have ejected stellar material in the form of gas and dust into the space between stars in the galaxy. Some of that material would have been used in the creation of our solar system. To learn more about this five-billion-year old question, Wrede and his team carried out an experiment in which they created and studied the exotic radioactive nuclei that have the greatest influence on the production of silicon isotopes in novae.

It turns out that the grains of stardust contain unusually high amounts of the isotope silicon-30, which is made up of 14 protons and 16 neutrons. Silicon-30 is quite rare on Earth (the most common is silicon-28). Researchers know that silicon-30 is produced in classical novae.