One of the chemicals that can be found in frozen comets wondering through space has puzzled scientists for quite some time now. While this type of comets is usually born at the edges of solar systems, and mostly contains frozen matter, it also contains tiny crystalline silicate particles, which require enormous temperatures to form. New studies conducted with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope may hold clues as to how silicate of this type formed, and how it came to be incorporated in comets.

While observing the formation process of a nearby, Sun-like star, experts from Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary noticed that the amorphous mass of dust that surrounded the forming star contained the non-crystalline form of the silicate. An infrared analysis of the dust also revealed the fact that crystalline particles existed within as well, which led them to believe that the main formation process for these elements consisted of outbursts from stars hitting the amorphous substance and crystallizing it.

The finds are consistent with existing knowledge, which has it that silicate particles are only formed under intense heat. At the edge of star systems, away from the main stars in the middle, temperatures are not nearly enough to trigger such changes in the structure of silicate particles, astrophysicists believe. In one of its studies of the EX Lupi star, conducted in April 2008, Spitzer noticed that a flare from the forming celestial body had left behind a significant amount of crystalline silicate particles, where, in previous observations, none were discovered.

“We believe that we have observed, for the first time, ongoing crystal formation. We think that the crystals were formed by thermal annealing of small particles on the surface layer of the star’s inner disk by heat from the outburst. This is a completely new scenario about how this material could be created,” Astronomer Attila Juhasz, from the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, explained. He is also one of the authors of a new paper detailing the process, which appears in the May 14th issue of the scientific journal Nature.

“At outburst, EX Lupi became about 100 times more luminous. Crystals formed in the surface layer of the disk but just at the distance from the star where the temperature was high enough to anneal the silicate–about 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) – but still lower than 1,500 Kelvin (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit). Above that, the dust grains will evaporate,” Juhasz said.

“These observations show, for the first time, the actual production of crystalline silicates like those found in comets and meteorites in our own solar system. So what we see in comets today may have been produced by repeated bursts of energy when the sun was young,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Spitzer Project Scientist Michael Werner added.