{"id":175070,"date":"2025-10-02T12:03:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T12:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/175070\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T12:03:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T12:03:16","slug":"space-dust-is-spongy-scientists-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/175070\/","title":{"rendered":"Space dust is spongy scientists say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">By looking through lots of previous studies and research, the team found clues about dust sponginess from different observations and space missions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Their findings suggest that lots of dust grains in space are not tiny, compact rocks but instead, fluffy sponges.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">That changes how much surface they have to help chemical reactions, how they stick together to form planets and how easily they can break apart.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Dr Alexey Potapov, the lead author of the research, says it &#8220;could radically change our understanding of how molecules form and evolve in space&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, not all astronomers are convinced by the new evidence about space dust sponginess. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">That&#8217;s because they say that if cosmic dust was spongy, then it would make the dust grains too cold or fragile to match what telescopes have observed. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The astronomers and astrochemists behind this review say they need to do more laboratory work and modelling to learn more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By looking through lots of previous studies and research, the team found clues about dust sponginess from different&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-175070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}