Clouds of dust drift through our galaxy. Telescopes can take pictures of these clouds when stars light them up. Who knew dust could be so beautiful? But it’s more than just pretty – we can learn a lot from it, too!
Stars like our Sun are born in dust clouds. Over time, leftover dust clumps together to help form planets. That makes it a little less dusty.
At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System appears prominently just after sunset – or just before sunrise – and is called zodiacal light.
Credit: Ruslan Merzlyakov/astrorms
But later, objects like comets and asteroids can create new dust by breaking up into tiny rocks. In our solar system, these rocky grains are called zodiacal dust. That’s because it’s mostly visible near the constellations of the zodiac. We can see the hazy glow it creates just after sunset or shortly before dawn sometimes, like in the picture above.
Around other stars, it’s called exozodiacal dust. Try saying that five times fast! It makes it hazy there too, so it can be hard to see distant planets.
Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be really good at seeing how much of this dust is swirling around nearby stars. That will help future telescopes know the best places to look to find planets like Earth!
Roman will also see more distant objects. It will peer inside dust clouds where new stars are bursting into life. That will help our James Webb Space Telescope know where to look to find baby planets. Webb can zoom in for a more detailed look at these young worlds by seeing how they filter their host star’s light.
Roman will see huge patches of the sky – much bigger than our Hubble and Webb telescopes can see. These missions will team up to explore all kinds of cosmic mysteries!
Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.
“What happened to the U.S. businesses that collaborated with fascism? The Rockefeller family’s Chase National Bank used its Paris office in Vichy France to help launder German money to facilitate Nazi international trade during the war, and did so with complete impunity. Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus Cologne was almost leveled by Allied bombing but its Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed, German civilians began using the plant as an air raid shelter.”
