[meteorite-list] Olympus destroyed by black hole!

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:05:54 -0400
Message-ID: <h1qqg3h9o7ipfka0vcm7dabpci3mpfsgb3_at_4ax.com>

Or at least, that'd explain the "marble" dust found.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/10/10/cosmic.dust.ap/index.html

Telescope detects space dust

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the
cosmic question of where we come from.

Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust -- mostly from dying
stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?

A NASA telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting
out of super-massive black holes.

The Spitzer Space Telescope identified large quantities of freshly made space
dust in a quasar about 8 billion light years from here.

Astronomers used the telescope to break down the wavelengths of light in the
quasar to figure out what was in the space dust. They found signs of glass,
sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the
University of Manchester in England. She is the lead author of a study that will
be published later this month in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dust is important in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly
gas. The leftover dust tends to clump together to make planets, comets and
asteroids, said astronomer Sarah Gallagher, a study co-author at the University
of California Los Angeles.

"In the end, everything comes from space dust," Markwick-Kemper said. "It's
putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out where we came from."

Astronomers figure that the planets that formed in the past several billion
years -- and those away from quasars -- came from dust that was belched from
dying stars. That's what happened with Earth.

That still leaves a question about where the dust from the first couple billion
years of the universe came from, which helped form early generations of star
systems.

"It's formed in the wind," of the black holes, Markwick-Kemper said. Gas
molecules collide in the searing heat of the quasar, which is thousands of
degrees Fahrenheit, and form clusters.

"These clusters grow bigger and bigger until you can call them dust grains," she
said.

Scientists who weren't part of the study hailed the work.

Cornell University astronomer Dan Weedman, the former director of NASA's
astrophysics division, said the study was an important step in answering a
fundamental mystery of the early universe.
Received on Wed 10 Oct 2007 08:05:54 PM PDT