A new study suggests the primordial elements needed to create planets in the universe may have been present in the very early stages of the cosmos' evolution.

The first stars to form after the Big Bang, roughly 12 billion to 15 billion years ago, were made mostly of hydrogen and a little helium. Heavier elements -- stuff like carbon, oxygen and other atoms that would be needed to build the core of a so-called "terrestrial" type planet -- did not yet exist.

Our own carbon-containing solarsystem did not develop until about 4.6 billion years ago.

Carbon is created when helium is fused inside a star. Yet researchers think the earliest stars were very large, bright and hot, and there is no clear evidence showing that carbon dust could escape into interstellar space before being destroyed by the star's powerful radiation and returned to the atoms from which it was made.

And carbon atoms alone don't make good planetary seeds, says Anthony Moffat of the University of Montreal. "It is important to have solids such as carbon dust grains to act as seeds to form planets," he says.

Now Moffat, along with Sergey Marchenko of Western Kentucky University and other researchers, have studied the region around a hot, massive star and its stellar companion and found that not only do the pair conspire to create carbon dust particles, but they cast them into deep space, where the carbon may be available to seed new types of stars, eventually creating environments where rocky planets might form.

The researchers discovered carbon dust out to about 100 times farther from the stellar pair than Pluto is from our Sun, a distance they say is far enough for the dust to leave the system without being destroyed.

The research was reported in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. The star, called WR 112, is in a class of objects that could be similar to a stage of life in the earliest stars in the universe, Moffat said.

Some of these Wolf-Rayet stars,as they are known, have been found in the past to have massive companion stars.Strong winds of atoms and charged particles stream out into space from bothstars. Where these opposing streams collide, they get compressed and can createdust, according to separateresearch presented earlier this year.

Because the stars orbit each other, the dust is sprayed into space in a spiral pattern, in the manner of a rotating garden sprinkler, a fact known since the late 1990s.

John Monnier of theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has been involved in earlierstudies of Wolf-Rayet stars, said the latest research by Marchenko and Moffatwould provide a new method for understanding how dust is produced in thesesystems.

"No one has mapped theextended dust envelope this far from a Wolf-Rayet star before," Monniersaid.

Earlier work by Monnier and his colleagues was done in the near-infrared wavelengths, which requires huge telescopes and can still only detect the dust in a few relatively nearby star systems. Marchenko and Moffat observed in the mid-infrared, which can see cooler dust farther from the stars.

"This discovery gives hopethat many more such spiral plumes can be detected, lending critical insightinto the nature of the underlying binary stars," Monnier said. "Howthese stars fit into massive stellar evolution is not clearly known."

The observations were made withthe Gemini North Telescope, atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. WR112 is estimated to beabout 14,000 light-years away.

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