The dust that condensed to form the sun, the Earth and the stuff of human bodies has long been thought to have originated in violent explosions of giant stars. But these explosions – called supernovae – can’t account for all the dust in the cosmos. Now, observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, led by University of Minnesota astrophysicists, have found cosmic dust where it had never been found before. The finding implies that the deaths of smaller stars may have supplied the early dust that seeded the myriad stars like our sun, and produced dust more efficiently than the big guns.

New observations of star cluster by U of M researchers help settle the dust on sun’s origin

Stellar Populations and Mass-Loss in M15: A Spitzer Detection of Dust in the Intra-Cluster Medium