'Perhaps we owe our existence to a nearby supernova explosion, compressing clouds of gas and dust with its shockwave, igniting stars and creating stellar nurseries, similar to what we see in Hubble's famous 'Pillars of Creation' picture.After decades of failures and misunderstandings, scientists have solved a cosmic riddle - what happens to the tons of dust particles that hit the Earth every day but seldom if ever get discovered in the places that humans know best, like buildings and parking lots, sidewalks and park benches. 'If we could date these objects someday, we could get a better idea of what our galaxy looked like in our region and what triggered the formation of the solar system,' said Tom Zega, scientific director of the UA's Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility and associate professor in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and UA Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Unfortunately, the stardust is so tiny, there arenвЂ™t enough atoms to date it exactly. We now know that carbonaceous and silicate dust grains can form in the same nova ejecta, and they get transported across chemically distinct clumps of dust within the ejecta, something that was predicted by models of novae but never found in a specimen.' 'It tells us about how dust grains form and move around inside as they are expelled by the nova. 'Our find provides us with a glimpse into a process we could never witness on Earth,' Haenecour added. In addition, the speck is the first known grain consisting of graphite with an oxygen-rich silicate inclusion. These results provide further laboratory evidence that both carbon- and oxygen-rich grains from novae contributed to the building blocks of our Solar System.' 'The 13C we found in LAP-149 is enriched more than 50,000-fold. 'The carbon isotopic compositions in anything we have ever sampled that came from any planet or body in our Solar System varies typically by a factor on the order of 50,' said Haenecour, who will join the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as an assistant professor in the fall. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)) NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green. The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. The pillars are part of a small region of the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space. The pillars are bathed in the blistering ultraviolet light from a grouping of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. The new image was taken with Hubble's versatile and sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3. The dark, finger-like feature at bottom right may be a smaller version of the giant pillars.

The towering pillars are about 5 light-years tall. Astronomers combined several Hubble exposures to assemble the wider view. wider view of the structures in this visible-light image. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and.

From dust you came stardust