Laboratory Studies of Grains from outside the Solar System: A New Kind of Astronomy

Abstract

Several phases whose origins predate that of the solar system have been identified in primitive meteorites during the past dozen years. The properties and the observed isotopic structures of these grains provide a variety of information, not obtainable in this detail by other means, on several highly interesting subjects: (a) details of the nuclear processes by which the chemical elements are synthesized in stars; (b) mixing during the life and during the explosion of stars; (c) circumstellar grain formation, and (d) constraints on conditions in the interstellar medium and the early solar system. An overview is given with special emphasis on implications for heavy element nucleosynthesis, and several cases are pointed out where the laboratory study of interstellar grains has led to “a new kind of astronomy”