A telescope spots freshly made space dust in a quasar. Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from. Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust -- mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?

 A NASA telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes. The Spitzer Space Telescope identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light years from here.

 Astronomers used the telescope to break down the wavelengths of light in the quasar to figure out what was in the space dust. They found signs of glass, sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester in England. She is the lead author of a study that will be published later this month in Astrophysical Journal Letters.