
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 18, 1990                   TAG: 9005180153
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

DISCOVERY OF GRAPHITE IN STARS ENDS DEBATE

Sooty leftovers from stars that lived billions of years ago, found inside the grainy minerals of a meteorite, are resolving a controversy that has long bedeviled astronomy.

The find, reported Wednesday by a research team from three universities, shows that clouds of dust drifting among the stars contain grains of graphite. Some astronomers had argued the carbon material should be there. Others thought it unlikely, if not impossible.

The question is important for scientists trying to understand the origin of chemical elements. Also, graphite taken from a meteorite provides a "stellar thermometer" that has recorded the temperatures inside stars.

"One can predict what kinds of grains ought to form" in the gases boiling up from the incandescent atmospheres of certain stars, said cosmochemist Edward Anders at the University of Chicago. "The big argument was whether it [graphite] really does" exist in the interstellar clouds.

The answer, now, is yes. "We have now identified graphite grains, one to four micrometers in diameter, in the Murchison chondrite," a stony meteorite that crashed to the ground in Australia in 1969, Anders and his co-workers reported in the current issue of the journal Nature. The data also suggest the graphite is old, "maybe tens or hundreds of millions of years older than the solar system," Anders said in a telephone interview. The solar system is 4.6 billion years old.

by CNB