Dust grains erstwhile than the solar system have been discovered in samples pick up from Asteroid Ryugu . The material wasbrought back to Earthby the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft from the Japanese Space Agency , and includes one unexpected find .

The team compared the sample from Ryugu with make love presolar grains find in carbonic chondrite meteorites that have landed on Earth in the past . Only 5 pct of meteorite on Earth contain stardust from before the solar organization , and each caryopsis is just about 1/100th the size of a full point on this pageboy . The oldest cognize is up to7 billion long time old .

As report inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters , Ryugu has all the love types of rubble grains that antedate the Sun , including a silicate one that is easy destroyed in chemical weathering . This suggested that when Ryugu ’s parent body was altered , this grain was somehow shielded .

“ The compositions and abundance of the presolar metric grain we regain in the Ryugu samples are similar to what we ’ve antecedently get in carbonaceous chondrite , ” co - lead author Larry Nittler , from Arizona State University , said in astatement . “ This gives us a more complete flick of our Solar System ’s formative outgrowth that can inform fashion model and future experiments on Hayabusa2 samples , as well as other meteorite . ”

Ryugu is a small Near - Earth asteroid that orbits the Sun every 16 calendar month . It is a pile of gravel loosely bound by gravity , and came together from a motley of different asteroids which had within them original stardust present in the presolar nebula .

The Sun is made of interstellar hydrogen pollute by the stuff spue out by several supernovae . That “ junk ” is what end up fix satellite and even us . Studying the presolar grain gives insight into the environment from where the Sun was carry and they can be tracked using isotope , slightly different versions of the same component .

“ Different type of presolar grains originated from different type of stars and stellar outgrowth , which we can key out from their isotopic signatures , ” co - top Jens Barosch , from Carnegie ’s Institution for Science , explained . “ The chance to distinguish and take these grains in the lab can avail us understand the astrophysical phenomena that shape our Solar System , as well as other cosmic objective . ”

This is just the beginning of the work being done on the sampling from Ryugu . More insights are certain to come .