Because the interstellar cloud had been slowly spinning, the result was a nearly flat rotating disk, which today is referred to as the solar nebula. Much of the dust and gas in the disk moved to the center of the nebula where it fed a growing protostar that eventually became the Sun. As the solar system formed, most of the pre-existing dust in the Sun's parent interstellar cloud was heated and vaporized. It is now known, however, that some of the original dust particles, known as presolar grains, survived solar system formation protected inside asteroids. By breaking up certain meteorites and dissolving them away in strong acids, scientists are able to isolate these presolar dust grains.
Presolar grains are literally bits of stars that can be studied in the laboratory.
Because the atoms in these grains are the original atoms from the parent stars, scientists can study this stardust to probe processes that occur inside stars and in the interstellar medium. Thus, the discovery of presolar grains has essentially opened up a new branch of astronomy, where laboratory microanalytical instrumentation takes the place of telescopes. For SIMS to yield the desired results, however, Nittler needed to add an image processing component to his laboratory toolbox. These applications let users visualize and manipulate complex or extremely large technical datasets to detect and display patterns, trends, anomalies, and other vital information. The software includes hundreds of mathematical and statistical routines from the IMSL Numerical Libraries, as well as image processing, signal processing, mapping, and general data manipulation features.