When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets, and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma, and stardust — known as interstellar clouds.
In the local parts of our galaxy alone, there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect — Antarctic ice.
My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighborhood, including the Solar System itself.
In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.
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