A Cornell University astron­o­mer who graduated from ‘Iolani School in 2006 is the lead author of a key study that supports the theory that cosmic dust from supernovas helped form the galaxies.

"Our results capture one of the most crucial missing pieces in the puzzle of explaining why dust, the seeds of stars and planets, is found in such large quantities in galaxies that formed when the universe was very young," said Ryan Lau, who grew up in Hono­lulu.

The paper was published last week in the journal Science, and the results were reported across the globe.

A supernova is the violent explosion that occurs at the end of the life of a massive, powerful star. It is also thought to produce dust.

But some have doubted whether dust could survive the violent explosions of the supernova. And, in fact, models have predicted that under some circumstances all of the newly formed dust would be destroyed in the hostile 20 million-degree Celsius environment of the supernova.

"This is where our results come into the picture," said Lau, who was in Spain giving a talk. "We’re providing the first direct observational detections of dust having survived this hostile supernova environment, which shows that supernovae can indeed be a mass-production dust factory."

Lau and his colleagues focused on a supernova remnant near the center of the Milky Way using infrared images from an observatory aboard a Boeing 747, the world’s only flying astronomical observatory and home to the largest-ever flying telescope.

Because the NASA aircraft flies up to 45,000 feet, scientific instruments aboard are able to gather images above more than 99 percent of Earth’s atmospheric water vapor and other infrared-absorbing gases.

Lau, 27, earned a physics degree from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 2010 before pursuing his doctorate at Cornell. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell.

Students at his alma mater, ‘Iolani School, coincidently, have been invited to help NASA with its problem of space dust interfering with instruments in space. NASA is sending a dust-removal experiment to the surface of the moon for testing, and the ‘Iolani robotics students will, among other things, remotely collect data to analyze the performance of the device.

Asked about this, Lau smiled.

"It’s funny that their efforts are completely going into blocking out the stuff that we love to detect," he said. "This is a great example of how the context and goals of your science can change the way you view something that seems as modest as dust."