interstellar molecular cloud collapsed tagged posts

Some of the Earth’s building material was stardust from red giants. Astronomers can also explain why the Earth contains more of this stardust than the asteroids or the planet Mars, which are farther from the sun.

Around 4.5 billion years ago, an interstellar molecular cloud collapsed. At its centre, the Sun was formed; around that, a disc of gas and dust appeared, out of which the earth and the other planets would form. This thoroughly mixed interstellar material included exotic grains of dust: “Stardust that had formed around other suns,” explains Maria Schoenbaechler, a professor at the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zurich...