From Newsgroup: talk.origins


https://phys.org/news/2026-02-student-cosmic-lab-life-earth.html

A Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece
of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory,
producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results
shed new light on how the chemical building blocks
of life may have formed long before Earth existed.
Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and
plasma physics in the School of Physics, used a
simple mix of gasesrConitrogen, carbon dioxide and
acetylenerCoto mimic the harsh and dynamic
environments around stars and supernova remnants.

By subjecting these gases to intense electrical
energy, she generated carbon-rich "cosmic dust"
similar to the material found drifting between
stars and embedded in comets, asteroids and
meteorites. Her results are published in The
Astrophysical Journal.
...

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae2bfe
Carbonaceous Cosmic Dust Analogs Distinguish
between Ion Bombardment and Temperature


Abstract
Carbonaceous cosmic dust is formed in the circumstellar envelopes of asymptotic giant branch stars and supernovae ejecta. Reprocessed
carbonaceous cosmic dust, abundant in the light elements C, H, O, and N
is found in asteroids and comets. These elements form dust that is well described as an amorphous, covalently bonded network solid with a
structure that is expected to reflect the key formative influences of
ion bombardment, temperature modification, and UV irradiation. Ion
bombardment of a dust grain by an energetic particle in a stellar wind
creates a nonequilibrium thermal spike event, which contrasts with the close-to-equilibrium process of annealing under the local ambient
conditions. There is a gap in our knowledge of how to distinguish ion bombardment as a synthesis process from postsynthesis thermal
modification through infrared spectroscopy. Here we synthesize dust from molecular precursors under a range of controlled space-like conditions
to form a database of IR spectra. We apply principal component analysis
to show that the first principal component correlates with ion
bombardment intensity during synthesis and the second principal
component correlates with annealing temperature. The spectral loading
curves of these two principal components are proposed as potential
diagnostic tools to uncover past formative influences on cosmic dust as
well as on the carbonaceous content of asteroids such as Bennu and
Ryugu. Amorphous organic networks composed of the CHON elements unify
previous ideas on cosmic dust by encompassing features of PAHs, tholins,
and mixed aliphaticrCoaromatic nanoparticles.


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