Catch a falling star: cosmic dust may reveal how life began, and a Sydney lab is making it from scratch

Recreating cosmic dust may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain organic matter

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

How does one acquire star dust? One option, as the Perry Como song suggests, is to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, so to speak.

Thousands of tonnes of cosmic dust bombard the Earth each year, mostly vaporising in the atmosphere. The asteroid and comet fragments that do not burn up - known as meteorites and micrometeorites if they hit Earth - provide scientists with valuable clues about the cosmos.