🌌 Stardust

The Story of Asteroid Bennu

Shariq Ali
Valueversity

The universe is full of things that quietly wait for the right moment to tell us their true story. Among these silent witnesses is a small asteroid named Bennu.

Bennu is a rocky body drifting through space, continuously orbiting the Sun. Although it lies far from Earth, the secrets hidden within it are deeply connected to our own origins.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully brought a small sample of soil from Bennu back to Earth. This was no ordinary dust. It contained extremely fine particles formed during the death of stars — events known as supernovae. In other words, these particles predate the birth of our Sun and Earth. In scientific terms, they are called presolar grains.

Research also revealed that the effects of water were not uniform across Bennu. In some regions, water altered the structure of rocks, while other areas remained almost perfectly preserved, just as they were at the beginning. This suggests that Bennu’s parent body was not simple, but internally quite complex.

The most astonishing discovery was that Bennu contains six times more stardust than typical meteorites found on Earth. This may indicate that our solar system formed in a region already rich in dust produced by the explosion of a massive star.

Notably, the research team included a Pakistani-American scientist, electron microscope engineer Zia ur Rahman, who is currently serving at NASA — a matter of pride for us all.

In simple words, Bennu reminds us that our Earth, our Sun, and we ourselves are — at some level — all connected to stardust.