Scientists in Seventh Heaven After Stardust Find

US scientists have for the first time collected samples of the stuff of songs and dreams - stardust.

High-flying Nasa planes scooped bits of interplanetary dust at heights of 12.5 miles above the Earth, researchers report in Science today. Scott Messenger of Washington University in St Louis used an ultra-sensitive probe to look at the dust more closely.

Among the millions of tiny bits of decayed comet and fragmented asteroid that rain down on the planet every day, they found more than 1,000 grains of silicate containing two tell-tale isotopes of oxygen. These grains - so small that a million of them side by side would stretch for a centimetre - had been blown across space from the explosion of some distant, long dead star.

At bottom, everything in the solar system is stardust: the universe began 13bn years ago as hydrogen and a small amount of helium. Carbon, oxygen, iron and the other elements were forged in the thermonuclear furnaces of the first generation of stars, and then scattered as stardust. Astronomers have been studying stardust - recognised by a spectral signature - through telescopes for decades.

"They never dreamed it would be possible to look this closely at a grain of stardust that has been floating around in the galaxy," Dr Messenger said. "We found that 1% of the mass of these interplanetary dust particles was stardust. So stardust is about 50 times as abundant in these particles as in meteorites, which suggests that it comes from far more primitive bodies."