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The stardust abundance in the local interstellar cloud at the birth of the Solar System

Nature Astronomy volume 1, pages 617–620 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Primitive Solar System materials, such as certain types of meteorites, interplanetary dust particles and cometary matter, contain small quantities of refractory dust grains that are older than our Solar System. These ‘presolar grains’ condensed in the winds of evolved stars and in the ejecta of stellar explosions, and they were part of the interstellar gas and dust cloud from which our Solar System formed 4.57 billion years ago1. Interstellar dust is not only stardust but forms in the interstellar medium as well, predominantly as silicates, and, to a lesser extent, as carbonaceous dust and iron particles2. Presolar grains represent a sample of stardust, and their abundances in primitive Solar System materials can be used to constrain the fraction of stardust among interstellar dust. Here we show that the size distribution of presolar silicates follows that observationally derived for interstellar dust, at least in the diameter range 100–500 nm, that current estimates of presolar grain abundances (mass fractions) are at least a factor of 2 too low, and that several per cent of the interstellar dust in the interstellar cloud pre-dating our Solar System was stardust, making it a minor but still important ingredient of the starting material from which our Solar System formed.

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Fig.  1: Oxygen-isotopic compositions of silicate and oxide stardust identified by NanoSIMS high-resolution ion imaging.
Fig. 2: Grain density of presolar silicates and oxides in the QUE 99177 meteorite.
Fig. 3: Grain density of presolar silicates and oxides in the MET 00426 meteorite.
Fig. 4: Grain-size distributions according to low- and high-resolution ion imaging.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Gröner and A. Sorowka for technical support, the Natural History Museum in Vienna for the loan of the Acfer 094 sample, and ANSMET for the loan of the QUE 99177 and MET 00426 samples. US Antarctic meteorite samples are recovered by the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, and characterized and curated by the Department of Mineral Sciences of the Smithsonian Institution and Astromaterials Curation Office at NASA Johnson Space Center. This work was supported by the Max Planck Society and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant LE3279/1-1 to J.L.).

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Hahn-Meitner-Weg 1, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    Peter Hoppe, Jan Leitner & János Kodolányi

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  1. Peter Hoppe
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Contributions

P.H. conducted the NanoSIMS work and J.L. the scanning electron microscope work. P.H. wrote most of the paper with important input from J.K. and J.L.

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Correspondence to Peter Hoppe.

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Supplementary Figures 1–2 and Supplementary Table 1

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Hoppe, P., Leitner, J. & Kodolányi, J. The stardust abundance in the local interstellar cloud at the birth of the Solar System. Nat Astron 1, 617–620 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0215-0

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