Here on Earth, at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, scientists have created stardust -- or more accurately, they've recreated the dust that forms in the outer atmosphere of a dying red giant star. Out there in space, over millions of years, this interstellar dust gathers together into a nebula and goes on to coalesce into planets and other stars. Down here on Earth, of course, NASA isn't trying to create its own planets (not yet, anyway) -- no, they have the much more humble undertaking of trying to better understand how the universe and its trillions of planets and stars evolved over the last 14 billion years.