CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – There may be itsy-bitsy aliens among us.
Scientists say seven microscopic particles collected by NASA’s comet-chasing spacecraft, Stardust, appear to have originated outside our solar system. If confirmed, this would be the world’s first sampling of contemporary interstellar dust.
“They are very precious particles,” the team leader, physicist Andrew Westphal of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement Thursday.
The dust collectors were exposed to what is believed to be the interstellar dust stream in the early 2000s and returned to Earth in 2006. Since then, dozens of scientists worldwide led by Westphal have examined scans of the collection panels to zero in on the particles. The team was assisted by 30,000 citizen-scientists, dubbed Dusters, who reviewed more than 1 million images in search of elusive tracks made by incoming particles.
The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.