While studying the remnants of a supernova in the "nearby" Small Magellanic Cloud, a team of scientists at UC Berkeley made an odd discovery: the amount of interstellar dust was only a small fraction of what it should have been.

Supernovae - exploding stars - have long been thought to be the source of most of the interstellar dust in the universe. New observations with the latest equipment is showing this may not necessarily be true. As astrophysicist Snezana Stanimirovic notes, "observations of supernova remnants in the Milky Way show much less dust than expected."

What gives?

According to studies by Ben Sugerman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,  it may be the result of some mistaken assumptions. Earlier scientists had assumed that supernova dust spreads uniformly, "like a big, spherical, hot bubble." The reality is that the dust may actually spread in a fashion that is "very clumpy." Doug Welch of McMaster University also points out that supernova dust quickly cools in outer space - and cold dust is not observable by infrared telescopes. This fact may account for the "apparent dust deficit" in earlier observations.

However, Stanimirovic points out that "a lot of dust grains get destroyed as the blast wave propagates." Dust grains grind against each until they're small to detect.