[Using a new French instrument called a NanoSIMS ion microprobe, Scott Messenger from Washington University in St. Louis, NASA's Lindsay Keller and colleagues were able to pick out the specks of star matter from the black sprinkles of dust.
The instrument ferreted out the tiniest molecules of stellar sand and glass, which carried a form of oxygen foreign to the Earth's solar system. These oxygen isotopes -- carrying a different number of neutrons from native oxygen -- lit up under the scanner, Messenger said.
''It's shining like a little beacon,'' Messenger, whose group's work is reported in this week's issue of the journal, Science, said in a telephone interview.
''They are these little glass balls that are shot full of little beads of iron, nickel, metal and iron sulfides,'' Messenger added. ''A colleague of ours has been looking at these things for years and found a lot of intriguing similarities with what astronomers think interstellar grains should look like.'']

[So far the team's sample is as tiny as the bits of silicate matter they are looking at -- they have identified just six
pieces of genuine stardust. But the team has analyzed the bits and believe three came from red giants or asymptotic giant branch stars, a fourth from a metal-poor star and the fifth and sixth possibly came from a metal-rich star or a supernova.]

Source: MSNBC

Stardust Mission