Laboratory-based Astronomy at the Nanometer Scale
When
Where
Dr. Tom Zega
Assistant Professor
Department of Planetary Sciences
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
"Laboratory-based Astronomy at the Nanometer Scale"
Throughout the course of their life cycles, stars shed matter through dust-driven winds or by outright exploding (supernova). This matter travels through the interstellar medium where it can become the starting material for new stars or planetary-forming nebulae. Our solar system was, among other things, built from such ancient stardust and some of this material was left over within primitive meteorites, the fossil relics of our solar nebula. I will show how, using the tools of nanoscience, we can probe, in the laboratory, such primitive meteorites, extract from them such ancient stardust, and gain fundamentally new insights into the histories of the grains and the stars from which they formed.