The most common solid in the cosmos? It’s dust.

“Solid” is everyone’s preferred state, being the matter-phase possessed by dogs, money, motorcycles, lasagna, lilacs, and your other favorite items. Astronomers feel the same way, even if gases are awesome when they conjure ethereal modern art sculptures like the Orion nebula. And liquids are intriguing due to their extreme rarity: we only know a single extraterrestrial body with surface fluids. Those celestial Walden Ponds are all on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Still, most solids are anonymous, like the million tiny asteroids roaming unseen between Mars and Jupiter, gaining notice only once per billion years when one gets gravitationally perturbed and crashes into Earth to suddenly let rats rule for a while.

True, nature created some no

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