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By Patricia Reaney

Scientists long believed that cosmic dust, the fine solid particles in space that are the building blocks of planets, was made in relatively cool, slow-burning normal stars and released in a stellar wind.


But astronomers in England and Wales say they have discovered that some supernovae spew out huge amounts of dust, suggesting they are the source of the first cosmic particles in the Universe.


"The origin of cosmic dust is, in fact, the basic question of the origin of our planet and others. Effectively, we live on a very large collection of cosmic dust grains and yet, until now, we have not been sure where cosmic dust is made," Dr Loretta Dunne, an astronomer at Cardiff University, said on Wednesday.


Dunne and colleagues at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh solved the mystery of cosmic dust -- which consists of particles about as small as those in cigarette smoke -- using a revolutionary camera called SCUBA which can detect sub-millimeter wavelengths.


"The dust actually shines at the submillimeter wavelength. You can make an image of it with this special camera and see it glowing," Dunne explained in an interview.


The team used SCUBA to look for dust in the remains of the supernova Cassiopeia A, which is 11,000 light years from the Earth. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles the distance light travels in a year.


Astronomers had suspected supernovae might produce cosmic dust, but until now had found only small amounts in them. However the remains of Cassiopeia A, the explosion of a star 30 times bigger than the Sun, showed plenty of cosmic dust.


"If all supernovae make the same amount of dust that we found in Cassiopeia A, supernovae are actually better at producing dust than stellar winds are in the galaxy," said Dunne, who reported the finding in the science journal Nature.


Because supernovae evolve more quickly than ordinary stars, they would have produced the first cosmic dust.


"The dust that we see at about 10 billion years or more ago in the past could only have come from supernovae," Dunne add