Astronomy
Isotopic Anomalies in Presolar Grains and Stellar Nucleosynthesis
Quick fact
Some presolar grains found in meteorites have isotopic compositions that differ from the Solar System by up to factors of thousands, and they represent dust that condensed in the outflows of stars like red giants and supernovae, preserving a record of nucleosynthesis that happened before our Sun formed.
Why this is interesting
Imagine holding a piece of a star that exploded billions of years before our Sun was born—yet it sits inside a rock you can pick up from Earth. How do we know it is truly extraterrestrial, and what does it tell us?