VIEW LARGER Portrait of asteroid Bennu from Osiris-REx, 2018. Scientists examining samples from the asteroid Bennu are discovering some of it is made up of what astronomers call “stardust.”
University of Arizona planetary scientist Jessica Barnes explains that means Bennu was formed by at least one collision with another, larger asteroid during the earliest moments of our solar system.
“These are very, very tiny grains of dust that originate around other stars and we can identify them in the sample because they look completely unlike anything in our solar system," she said.
The samples were brought to Earth by the UA-backed OSIRIS-REx mission. Barnes says Bennu also showed signs being blasted by micrometeorite impacts during its 4-point-6-billion-year history.
The material was examined using instruments from UA’s Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory for Astromaterials Analysis. That’s a tool that can reveal a sample’s chemical elements at nanometer scale.
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