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Planetary science

Cometary dust under the microscope

Nature volume 537, pages 37–38 (2016)Cite this article

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The Rosetta spacecraft made history by successfully orbiting a comet. Data from the craft now reveal the structure of the comet's dust particles, shedding light on the processes that form planetary systems. See Letter p.73

Planetary systems such as the Solar System were built from dust in protoplanetary nebulae, the clouds of gas and dust in which stars and planets are born. These dust particles collided, stuck together and eventually formed planetesimals, the building blocks of planets. Comets are leftover planetesimals, made of ice and dust, and range from hundreds of metres to tens of kilometres in diameter. They spend most of their lives on the outskirts of the Solar System — away from damaging radiation and high temperatures, and avoiding collisions with other objects — thus preserving the material that originally formed the protoplanetary nebula. By studying comets, we can learn about the processes that gave rise to the Solar System, even though those processes happened almost five billion years ago1. On page 73, Bentley et al.2 show that cometary dust particles are formed from a hierarchical assembly of smaller constituents, a discovery that has implications for our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

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Figure 1: Dust from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

ESA/Rosetta/MPS for COSIMA Team/Langevin et al. (2016)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ludmilla Kolokolova is in the Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.,

    Ludmilla Kolokolova

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  1. Ludmilla Kolokolova
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Correspondence to Ludmilla Kolokolova.

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Kolokolova, L. Cometary dust under the microscope. Nature 537, 37–38 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/537037a

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