University of Central Florida | 11 Aug 2010
The chemical breakdown of minerals that may be lurking in space dust soon will be available to scientists around the world.
Because space dust contains the basic ingredients that form planets, the University of Central Florida physicists’ analysis could provide important clues about how the solar system formed and how life emerged.
For decades, astrophysicists have been studying these clouds of dust, which contain ices, silicate minerals and iron compounds. But until the UCF team started looking at earth’s minerals with far IR spectroscopy, identifying the minerals in space dust was . . . ambiguous at best.
...
Knowing what kinds of minerals are floating in space and are on asteroids and other planets can give scientists clues to the temperature of those celestial bodies, whether water is present and how the asteroids and planets were formed.
...
The far-IR spectra for the minerals UCF’s team studied will be available to scientists around the world via the Internet once the project concludes this summer. Findings will be published this year in the highly ranked Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.
Scientists use IR spectral analysis to look at the chemical properties of matter and gas. Each mineral is ground up to a fine powder, mixed and melted into a transparent plastic pellet, and then it is placed in an instrument that looks at its infrared transmission spectrum.
Each mineral absorbs infrared at specific frequencies that correspond to its chemical composition and structure – playing a very specific “tune” that can be observed and recorded by the spectrometer. Minerals can be identified in space by comparing the “music” emitted by cosmic dust with the “scores” the UCF researchers wrote for the minerals in the lab.
The observations in space don’t always match the chemical signature of minerals on earth, possibly because they undergo unique kinds of weathering, such as cosmic ray bombardment.