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$1.38 million to pick 'large' pieces of supernova grit out of meteorite

01.01.70

Ernst K. Zinner, PhD, inquire into professor of physics and earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences has received a three-year, $1,380,000 allocate from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to study presolar grains in a sample of the Murchison meteorite, a Noachic meteorite that fell to Earth near the town of Murchison, Australia, in 1969.

Presolar grains are literally inconsequential bits of stars — stardust — that were born and died billions of years ago, before the formation of the solar system.

From a humanitarian chunk of the meteorite, Zinner hopes to extract exceptionally large grains that came from supernovae, colossus stars that exploded at the ends of their lives. The larger grains will allow him to make more comprehensive measurements and, in put together, achieve a clearer understanding of what happened in these long-extinct stars -- where most of the elements that make up our bodies and our Terra were forged.

Until the 1960s, most scientists believed that the early solar system got so hot that presolar material could not have survived intact. However, in the mid-1960s, researchers started verdict unusual isotopic ratios of the noble gases neon and xenon in certain types of meteorites. The really that these volatile gases were still there suggested that they were trapped in very refractory (heat-resistant) mineral grains.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis News