On 12/10/2023 02:46, StarDust wrote:
On Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 6:07:11 PM UTC-7, RichA wrote:
On Wednesday, 11 October 2023 at 16:51:09 UTC-4, StarDust wrote:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67078632
Looks like coal, stuff we use to heat our house!
🤣😃
They lucked-out. Due to the fineness of some of the rock, they got a lot of extra "dust" in the craft which can be added to the actual sample.
Not coal. No plants where it came from, but the carbon content is interesting.
OK, than where the carbon comes from in space?
Shed from stars nearing the end of their life as red giants. Carbon
stars are fun to look at many of them are visibly deep red! Basically
they are big cool sooty stars losing carbon from their surface.
It is a side effect of stellar evolution that on the main sequence
heavier stars run a CNO cycle burning hydrogen in their core. So when
the hydrogen and helium fuel runs out there is loads of C, N & O.
Hind's Crimson Star aka R Leporis is one such example. It is almost LED
red. S&T did a nice article on observing them about 5 years ago.
https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/observing-carbon-stars/
Astronomers had been observing the spectrum of Buckminsterfullerenes as
dust in space long before it was isolated on Earth. It was an unknown
compound with no know terrestrial match until it was synthesised.
It was later realised that you could extract fullerenes from common soot
using benzene but no-one had ever done that experiment! Or if they had
noticed and reported the peculiar properties of the isolate.
--
Martin Brown
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)