An international team of researchers has strong evidence that space dust collected from NASA’s Stardust mission originated outside of our solar system. Research physicist Andrew Westphal who leads the analysis at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, explains this exciting discovery.

"The Stardust mission also brought back the very first samples we think of material from outside the solar system. And that was using a collector that was exposed to the stream of interstellar dust that is coming into the solar system. It’s an extremely tenuous stream of dust, and so we didn’t get very many particles. And in fact, after many years of work, we think we've identified a total so far of seven."

The samples were analyzed using instruments such as synchrotrons and ion microscopes, cutting edge technology which he says has been crucial to the analysis.

"The instruments that we use to study these are on the cutting edge of what's available to microscopists. And so, that's been a very important part of this mission in fact is to use instruments that we really have not been available until now."