Without dust no life

The powder can also be beneficial. In fact, it is essential: the Sun and other stars were beginning dusty, when microscopic particles joined together to form the Solar System. When the stars die, with the dust that are made will give life to a new generation.

On Earth, dust is important. To begin with, if the planet was completely clean, it would be very hot and humid. Without it, the water vapor to condense not begin until the relative humidity reaches 300%.

It would have almost no dust clouds, since water vapor sticks to the surfaces of granite dust. And fair weather, the heat would be unbearable.
Over billions of years of rock dust of the desert has nurtured some of the more desolate regions of the world, carrying iron and nutrients.

On glaciers, for example, the dust comes as a catering service, for such forms of life that most extremophile known. Even within the glaciers there is life that thrives thanks to dust in the oceans and increasing the productivity of plankton.

The secrets of space

There are a lot of water out there but not everywhere and in the same quantities. For example, data collected in 1999 by the mission SWAs Submillime-ter-Wave Astronomy Satellite-attached by Nasir Al Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, revealed several surprises.

The project was designed to study the formation of stars in the dark and dense clouds of interstellar gas primarily through emissions of water, molecular oxygen, carbon atoms and carbon monoxide.
From the comments were striking for the contradictory data. In regions whose temperature was 30 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 ° C) was much less water than expected. However, in areas of dense clouds where new stars are born and gas is thousands of degrees, the amount of water is up to 10,000 times higher.

You do not have to move away from our little apple cosmic. In 2000, a group of British scientists found that crystals of salt water contém within meteorites. The rocks were originated 2 million years after the solar system formed. Something similar happened with the Monahans meteorite, fallen in Texas in March 1998, and Zag, named after the Moroccan city in whose vicinity was precipitated in August that year. And are not alone. Indeed, comets are true costaleros of ice water. When our planet had a few million years, its surface was subjected to an intense bombardment of these objects, which deposited approximately 30% of the water that now exists on Earth. So things are, one third of the precious liquid to our bodies has a cometary origin.

The asteroid, primarily located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, also carrying his water droplet, from 0.5% of meteorites siliceous 20% characteristic of carbonaceous condritas. These are the oldest of all and represent 70% of that fall to Earth.