BARELY 700 million years after the big bang, the universe was filled with dust that went on to form stars and planets – and eventually us too. This dust is thought to have been produced by supernovae that signalled the end of the first generation of stars.
But there has been a problem with this theory: the remnants of more recent supernovae appeared to have far less dust than would have been necessary for supernovae to be the “dust factories” of the universe.
Now a pair of studies may have solved the mystery of the missing dust. Both teams used NASA’s…
