Donald Brownlee
Donald Brownlee
Donald Eugene Brownleeis a professor of astronomy at the University of Washingtonand the principal investigator for NASA's Stardust mission. His primary research interests include astrobiology, comets, and cosmic dust. He was born in Las Vegas, Nevada...
formed solar
We can tell the difference, absolutely, for something that formed in our own solar system, and something that formed around another star.
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Virtually all of the atoms in our bodies and in the Earth were in interstellar grains - stardust grains - before the solar system formed. We're using this comet as a library that picked up records of the formation of our solar system, and has been storing them far from the sun at very low temperatures for four and a half billion years.
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It's thrilling. We have samples of a comet from the edge of the solar system.
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Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system ? a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.
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It is quite exciting to find these things at the edge of the solar system.
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We're approaching the end of a fantastic voyage. This is the farthest anything from Earth has traveled and come back. Soon we'll be able to examine the building blocks that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
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We've brought back an ancient cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system.
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Last Sunday, after seven years in space traveling nearly three billion miles, Stardust landed in the Great Salt Lake Desert with a treasure from when the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago. We should have more than one million particles larger than one micron in diameter.
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When they formed, they were either red-hot or white-hot and we found them in the Siberia of the solar system.
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Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice. We've found samples from the coldest part of the solar system that have mineral grains formed under extremely high temperatures.
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If it was formed in our solar system, then it had to be transported from the hottest regions to the coolest.
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The interesting thing is we are finding these high-temperature minerals in materials from the coldest place in the solar system.
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I fully expect that textbooks in the future will have a lot of information about the formation of the solar system from these samples that landed this morning in Utah.
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In the coldest part of the solar system, we've found samples that have formed at extremely high temperatures. When these minerals formed, they were either red-hot or white-hot grains.