How to Build a Universe in a Bottle: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Guess what? You don’t need a spaceship anymore to touch the stars. All it takes is a glass tube, a vacuum pump, and about 10,000 volts.

Using this recipe, a PhD student in materials and plasma physics at the University of Sydney named Linda Losurdo created cosmic dust from scratch in her laboratory. The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal, offer a new window into understanding how the chemical ingredients for life formed long before Earth existed.

"We no longer have to wait for an asteroid or comet to come to Earth to understand their histories," Losurdo said in a university press release. "You can build analogue environments in the laboratory and reverse engineer their structure using the infrared fingerprints."

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Losurdo and her supervisor, Professor David McKenzie, evacuated air from glass tubes to recreate the vacuum of space, introduced a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and acetylene, and subjected it to about 10,000 volts for roughly an hour. The resulting plasma (a glow discharge) broke apart the molecules that then recombined into more complex structures and settled as a fine layer of dust onto silicon chips.

This dust contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a.k.a, the CHON elements, which are central to many organic substances essential for life. It also emits the same infrared signatures that astronomers detect in actual cosmic dust, confirming that the laboratory process closely mirrors what occurs in space, according to the university.

"It's like we have recreated a little bit of the Universe in a bottle in our lab," Losurdo said.

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By applying principal component analysis to infrared spectra, the authors essentially found a way to read the history of that dust. The first component correlates with the intensity of ion bombardment during synthesis, and the second with the subsequent annealing temperature.

In other words, a grain's infrared fingerprint reveals whether it was struck by energetic particles or simply heated. The paper suggests that these tools could be applied to carbonaceous material from asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, samples of which have already been brought to Earth.

"By making cosmic dust in the lab, we can explore the intensity of ion impacts and temperatures involved when dust forms in space," McKenzie explained in the release.

"That's important if you want to understand the environments inside cosmic dust clouds, where life-relevant chemistry is thought to be happening."

According to the release, between 3.5 and 4.56 billion years ago, Earth was bombarded by meteorites and interplanetary dust that likely delivered vast amounts of organic material to the planet. Where that material came from remains a mystery.

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"This also helps us interpret what a meteorite or asteroid fragment has been through over its lifetime," McKenzie added. "Its chemical signature holds a record of its journey, and experiments like this help us learn how to read that record."

The next step, according to the university, is to build a database of infrared fingerprints from lab-made cosmic dust so that astronomers can identify promising regions of space and reconstruct the processes that shaped them.

Who needs a ship in a bottle, when you can have an entire universe?