Cosmic origin lies in black-hole wind
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from.
Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust -- mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It’s in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes. It identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light-years from here. Scientists found signs of glass, sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, they will report in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
