A tiny, "alien" grain of dust that was created as a long-gone star died has been found by scientists.

The tiny speck of stardust was found inside of a chondritic meteorite in Antarctica, having originally been hurled into space by an exploding star that died even before our own sun existed.

Little pieces of grain like the new discovery are thought to help create the early mix of materials that helped form the sun and our planets – and, eventually, life. But they are rarely seen, because it is so difficult for them to survive the chaos of the beginning of a solar system.

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Now scientists hope the small and lucky grain could offer an insight into the conditions that helped form everything that surrounds us.

"As actual dust from stars, such presolar grains give us insight into the building blocks from which our solar system formed," said Pierre Haenecour, lead author of the new paper published in Nature. "They also provide us with a direct snapshot of the conditions in a star at the time when this grain was formed."

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The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 12/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa 13/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa 14/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa 15/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa 16/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa 17/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa 18/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa 19/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station 20/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts 21/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity 22/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA 23/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto 24/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta 25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA 26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa” 28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) 29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere 30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

The grain has been named LAP-149 and is the only known piece of graphite and silicate grains that scientists can trace back to the particular type of stellar explosion that it managed to survive. After being cast out by that eruption, it flew through space and arrived in the area that is now our solar system, getting caught up in a primitive meteorite.

Novae like the one that threw out the speck of dust happen when a binary star system includes the core remnant of a dying star known as a white warf, attached to another star that is either a main sequence star or red giant. As the white dwarf fades, it saps away the substance of its bigger companion – and once it is big enough, it spews out new chemical elements, deep into space, throwing them across the universe and helping spread entirely new materials to other solar systems.

That process has helped take the universe from the hydrogen, helium and lithium that were present when it began to the rich and varied set of elements that surround us today. Without such dispersal, there would be no life, which is made up of out the more complex and newer elements spread in such violent encounters.

To understand more about that process, the researchers took the tiny grain and analysed it at the atomic level, using highly developed technology. As they did, they discovered just how alien it was, finding huge amounts of a strange carbon isotope known as 13C.

"The carbon isotopic compositions in anything we have ever sampled that came from any planet or body in our solar system varies typically by a factor on the order of 50," said Haenecour. "The 13C we found in LAP-149 is enriched more than 50,000-fold.

"These results provide further laboratory evidence that both carbon- and oxygen-rich grains from novae contributed to the building blocks of our solar system."

The stars that gave birth to the tiny stardust grains will now be long dead. But by studying how they are made up, scietnists can understand the conditions where they came from, the researchers write in the new paper.

"Our find provides us with a glimpse into a process we could never witness on Earth," Haenecour added. "It tells us about how dust grains form and move around inside as they are expelled by the nova. We now know that carbonaceous and silicate dust grains can form in the same nova ejecta, and they get transported across chemically distinct clumps of dust within the ejecta, something that was predicted by models of novae but never found in a specimen."

The scientists are unable to tell exactly how old the grain is, because it is not made up of enough atoms. They hope to find new and bigger pieces to try and understand how they helped lead to the formation of our solar system.