Scientists are vacuuming the ceiling of Canterbury Cathedral, The Guardian reported. Wearing chemical protection suits and backpack vacuums, Penny Wozniackiewicz and her colleague Mathias van Ginneken search for micrometeorites from space in the dust accumulating there.
We are looking for small microscopic areas. We are currently collecting thousands of dust particles and hope that some of them come from space
Van Ginken explains.
According to some models, about 15 thousand tons of dust and other materials fall to the Earth annually. Most of this lingers in the atmosphere, but about 5,000 tons reach the surface – pieces of comets and asteroids between 50 microns and 2 millimeters in size.
The intense heat of the collision in the atmosphere changes the metals, so serious investigations are needed to determine what they were like before the impact. The composition of the isotopes that make up matter can often be used to infer the shape of the celestial body from which it originated and when it may have formed.
By understanding how many dust particles reach the surface, we can come up with estimates of how much material has reached the Earth over time, and from that we can estimate how this dust has contributed to the Earth's chemical composition.
Wozniackiewicz noted.
There are two possible ways to do this: either it reaches down and enters the surface chemistry, or it reaches high enough into the atmosphere
he added.
Dust and dust fall
Falling cosmic dust particles can be identified by their transformation into small balls when they enter the atmosphere. Through its quantity, it can be deduced how the amount of dust that reaches the ground changes.
When the solar system was younger, there was a lot more cosmic dust because there were more celestial bodies of different sizes and they collided more often. The large amount of dust that fell at that time is now inside the stones.
At the beginning of Earth's history, a thousand times as much dust fell on the planet as today, and may have played a key role in the evolution of life. It can bring amino acids and iron, which would otherwise not be present to the surface.
Antarctica Mazik
I wish there was a place where there weren't people walking around, and where fallen materials could be inspected in their original condition. The best candidate for such research is Antarctica, because it is completely untouched. However, it is very expensive to get there, and the validity of the data that can be collected there is only limited to the specified latitude. However, even in places inhabited by people, there are areas where people never walk: this is how the researchers ended up on the roof of the church.
Samples taken from space provide a serious opportunity for scientific work. One example is NASA's Orisis-REx mission returning a sample from the asteroid Bennu. However, not everyone gets their hands on one of the 4.5 billion-year-old specimens. In the case of Bennu, we learn something about the composition of a single celestial body, and from the dust we can learn about the number of millions of asteroids.
Urban collecting of cosmic dust was started by Norwegian jazz musician Jon Larsen in 2017 and has since turned into a bit of a hobby. Collectors are not looking for a needle in a haystack, but rather sifting through hundreds of kilograms of dust in search of cosmic spheres.
Cosmic samples can easily become contaminated, so it pays to be careful. But that's not why researchers are wearing full biological protective gear – they don't want to catch bird flu from bird droppings or bones that are common in this environment.
Woznikiewicz and Van Ginneken have already visited the roofs of Rochester, Salisbury and Winchester cathedrals. Once they descend the narrow stairs, the bags filled with looted dust only need to be sterilized, and the hours-long sorting can begin, during which they hope to find the object that came from space.wished for Domains.
(Watchman)