$1.38 million to pick ‘large’ pieces of supernova grit out of meteorite
Ernst K. Zinner, research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a three-year, $1,380,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study presolar grains in a sample of the Murchison meteorite, a primitive meteorite that fell to Earth near the town of Murchison, Australia, in 1969. Presolar grains are literally tiny bits of stars — stardust — that were born and died billions of years ago, before the formation of the solar system. Some carry within them clues to the process of nucleosynthesis by which new elements are forged in the bellies of supernovae.