THE magic ingredient that inspired Hoagy Carmichael, David Bowie and Woody Allen, among others, has been tracked down. Scientists have examined crystals of stardust in the laboratory for the first time. Their findings confirm that star quality is indeed the rarest of things: of more than 100,000 particles collected from the upper atmosphere, just six are true stardust, from beyond the solar system.

The sprinkle of crystals, which helped make Carmichael’s song Stardust so popular, gave Bowie his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust and inspired Allen’s film Stardust Memories, form vast clouds across the galaxy and, away from city lights, can be seen as a dark band across the Milky Way. On planet Earth, it may be beloved of hippies and Hollywood, but stardust’s galactic origins are dark and violent: it is the debris of dying stars.

Scientists at Nasa and Washington University, St Louis, collected hundreds of thousands of tiny particles from the upper atmosphere, using planes flying 20km (12½ miles) high.

Examination with a state-of-the-art microscope confirmed six of them as stardust, as small as a millionth of a centimetre in diameter, allowing researchers to analyse their mass and structure. The results, published today in the journal Science, could cast new light on the origin of stars and planets, which coalesce from condensing clouds of stardust.

Scientists sifted the stardust from tiny asteroid and comet fragments called interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). A sophisticated new microscope, the NanoSIMS probe, has allowed them to pick out individual grains that come from outside the solar system.

Dr Scott Messenger, of the Laboratory for Space Sciences at Washington University, said: “Astronomers have been studying stardust through telescopes for decades, but they never dreamed it would be possible to look this closely at a grain.”

Six of the stardust grains appeared to have come from “red giant” or “asymptotic giant branch” stars — two late stages in stellar evolution. The fourth was from a star containing little metal and the remaining two possibly originated from a metal-rich star or supernova explosion.

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