To some extent, scientists are professional downers, the people whose job it is to respond to outrageously improbable stories with “well, actually…” But every now and again they manage to confirm something that lots of people wanted to believe anyway.

This is one of those stories.

For years, amateur astronomers have been suggesting that microscopic, spherical particles collected from their roofs are actually tiny meteorites, the dust that formed our Solar System fallen to Earth. Scientists took the claim at face value but ended up being the downers again, at least initially. As a recent paper on this topic describes it: