A new study led by the European Space Agency and NASA involving the University of Colorado Boulder indicates NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system.
Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004, studying the giant planet, its rings and its moons. The spacecraft has also sampled millions of ice-rich dust grains with its cosmic dust analyzer instrument. The vast majority of the sampled grains originate from active jets that spray from the surface of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus.
But among the myriad microscopic grains collected by Cassini, a special few -- just 36 grains -- stand out from the crowd. Scientists conclude these few specks of material came from interstellar space -- the space between the stars.
A paper on the subject was published April 14.
Alien dust in the solar system is not unanticipated. In the 1990s, the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission made the first in-situ observations of this material, which was later confirmed by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The dust was traced back to the local interstellar cloud: a nearly empty bubble of gas and dust our solar system is traveling through with a distinct direction and speed.
"From that discovery, we always hoped we would be able to detect these interstellar interlopers at Saturn with Cassini. We knew that if we looked in the right direction, we should find them," said Nicolas Altobelli, Cassini project scientist at ESA (European Space Agency) and lead author of the study. "Indeed, on average, we have captured a few of these dust grains per year, travelling at high speed and on a specific path quite different to that of the usual icy grains we collect around Saturn."
The tiny dust grains were speeding through the Saturn system at over 45,000 mph (72,000 kilometers per hour), fast enough to avoid being trapped inside the solar system by the gravity of the sun and its planets.
“These new findings are highly relevant for understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems as well as the interstellar medium,” said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Sascha Kempf, a study co-author at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). LASP Research Associate Sean Hsu also is a CU-Boulder co-author.
"It's a small miracle to make this detection, given that our instrument was designed primarily to measure dust from within the Saturn system, as well as all the other demands on the spacecraft," said Marcia Burton, a Cassini fields and particles scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a co-author of the paper.
Importantly, unlike Ulysses and Galileo, Cassini was able to analyze the composition of the dust for the first time, showing it to be made of a very specific mixture of minerals, not ice. The grains all had a surprisingly similar chemical make-up, containing major rock-forming elements like magnesium, silicon, iron and calcium in average cosmic proportions. Conversely, more reactive elements like sulfur and carbon were found to be less abundant compared to their average cosmic abundance.
"Cosmic dust is produced when stars die, but with the vast range of types of stars in the universe, we naturally expected to encounter a huge range of dust types over the long period of our study," said Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, a co-author of the paper and co-investigator of Cassini's dust analyser used for the measurements.
Stardust grains are found in some types of meteorites, which have preserved them since the birth of our solar system. They are generally old, pristine and diverse in their composition. But surprisingly, the grains detected by Cassini aren't like that. They have apparently been made rather uniform through some repetitive processing in the interstellar medium, the researchers said.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cosmic Dust Analyzer is supported by the German Aerospace Center (DLR); the instrument is managed by the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
CU-Boulder has had a significant role in the Cassini mission since its launch in 1997. Professor Larry Esposito of LASP is the principal investigator on a $12.5 million instrument suite flying on the Cassini spacecraft known as the UltraViolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS). Esposito and colleagues have used UVIS to make a number of important findings about Saturn’s rings and moons during the mission.
For more information about Cassini, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.
Contact:
Emily Baldwin, European Space Agency media relations
Preston Dyches, JPL media relations, 818-354-7013
Sascha Kempf, CU-Boulder, 303-492-8038
Jim Scott, CU-Boulder media relations, 303-492-3114
