by Vicki Phipps

Created on: August 12, 2008   Last Updated: August 13, 2008

Scientists are not unlike you and I when it comes to the frustration of dealing with dust, and in my way of thinking, dust is dust. Even so, science says space dust has a bigger impact on Earth than house dust does to your home. Dust is a universal issue, so we're not alone when it comes to dealing with dust.

Where I come from dust can be an irritating thing I battle with every day. No matter how often I clean as I sneeze, I can't keep the dust away, because you see, all around my Texas town, there's plenty of dust that blows around and sometimes there's so much dust that we can't even see to drive. That's why we call the Texas demise, "Dirt Devils in the sky." Even so and although we in Texas know that dust is just a small price to pay for living in a big, wide open place, I was still surmised to find that apparently scientists fuss just as much about dust as you and I who sneeze as we clean all the time.

SPACE DUST: WHAT IT'S MADE OF

I'm not sure how, but I found the answer to,"What is space dust and what is it made of?" All I was trying to do was to go online and find some new and improved miracle product for home dust removal, but somehow I got confused and ended up learning things about space dust that seemed more interesting to me than dust magnets will ever be.

According to Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia, cosmic dust is a type of dust that's made of particles in space which are just a few molecules of only 0.1 mm in size. That seemed pretty small to me, but then my research told me that cosmic dust comes from several astronomical locations, including intergalactic dust, interstellar dust, interplanetary dust and circum-planetary dust, which is such dust within a planetary ring, so you see, there's apparently a ton of dust out there. They also say that within our own Solar System, interplanetary dust causes the zodiacal light and sources of this dust include comet dust, asteroidal dust, dust from the belt and interstellar dust passing through our solar system. All I can add to that is that now I see why there's always so much dust in my house. Other than that, what does space dust have to do with us?

WHAT SPACE DUST DOES TO US:

In April of 2005, Science Daily reported that space dust is more than just a nuisance. Those tiny pieces of dust just might potentially affect the world's climate, the sea and even the food we eat. They also explained that each year nearly 40,000 tons of cosmic dust falls to Earth from outer space, and just recently, the first successful

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