Here's one for you, Su

[wishful thinker]

This is from today's newspaper.  Pianistimo will no doubt take as further proof. 

"Dust overturns understanding of solar system

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 2:56am GMT 15/12/2006

Dust from the tail of a comet has overturned our picture of how the Solar System came into being.
The particles were captured by Nasa's Stardust spacecraft before Comet Wild-2 fell to Earth in January, landing in the Utah desert after a journey of 2.88 billion miles.
Because comets are among the oldest objects in the Solar System, scientists, including researchers from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum, believe the dust can provide insights into the birth of the Earth.

An analysis of the particles, published today in the journal Science, suggests that our Solar System may have been created in a gigantic mixing process, churning far more material than imagined. The dust is made up of many different mineral compositions rather than a single dominant one.
This implies that it was formed in many environments before coming together to make the comet, indicating a great deal of mixing prior to the formation of planets.
"Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation" said Donald Brownlee, of Washington University, the lead scientist. "We have shown that is not the case." Particularly significant was the discovery of calcium aluminium inclusions, which are thought to have formed close to the young Sun.
Dr Phil Bland, of Imperial, added: "It seems the Solar System was born in much more turbulent conditions than we previously thought." "

[prometheus]

Ok that's interesting.

It is really a trend that when new data is uncovered we discover that some process in the universe/galaxy/solar system is more complex/richer/intense/amazing than we thought.

We always find out that things are even more 'epic' than we had imagined. That's always fun.


Note that this is about our solar system. Seems to suggest that a lot of the matter that was once part of our solar system is now gone because the process was so violent. So it was thrown into deep space.


Data like this makes things like interstellar planets more likely. Some people claim they have evidence for them. But at this point we have not really definitely discovered a single one.