While our curiosity of aliens still goes unsatiated as we look for signs in radio transmissions and the sky, aliens may already be here. Perhaps not as how we imagined, but in the form of microscopic outer-space particles captured by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft over ten years ago and delivered to Earth in 2006.
A research team lead by Andrew Westphal, physicist with UC Berkeley took eight years to locate and study the interstellar bits. The research was also significantly aided by volunteers who were citizen scientists. On Thursday, Westphal and his colleagues including the volunteers announced that the particles were not from our solar system and probably got here through the explosion of a star. They also suggested that they were more than a hundred million years old.
“This dust is relatively new, since the lifetime of interstellar dust is only 50 to 100 million years, so we are sampling our contemporary galaxy,” said UC Berkeley research physicist Anna Butterworth
“A critical aspect of this was the dedication and hard work of the citizen scientists who worked on this,” Westphal said. “We couldn’t have done it without them.” Even though the team can not say with complete certainty that the particles are from interstellar space, it is the likely possibility since they were collected from the right direction – the direction of the interstellar wind.
Once the particles pass certain tests, like the oxygen isotope analysis, scientists can begin a mass collection that will span the varieties of dust from outer-space and perhaps reveal much more to us regarding alien worlds