Cosmic dust bunnies: Why the universe might be fluffier than we thought

Space dust provides more than just awe-inspiring pictures like the Pillars of Creation. It can provide the necessary materials to build everything from planets to asteroids. But what it actually looks like, especially in terms of its “porosity” (i.e., how many holes it has) has been an area of debate for astrochemists for decades. A new paper from Alexey Potapov of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and his co-authors published in The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review suggests that the dust that makes up so much of the universe might be “spongier” than originally thought.