Carbon is the stuff of life. And our solar system seems to be much more generously endowed with it than most other parts of the galaxy.
Just about everywhere you look in the solar system, you find carbon: from the searing atmosphere of Venus to the oily slush of Titan to the hair of the dog that bit you. In fact, carbon is the fourth most common element in the solar system after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. And since astronomers consider our solar system to be fairly mundane, most of them assume that carbon is just as common in the rest of the galaxy. But a recent reexamination of the composition of about 200 ordinary stars in the Milky Way has shown that our sun contains much more carbon than most of its neighbors. Our sooty home is apparently something of a carbon oasis.
This new assessment of carbon’s abundance ...
