1. Astr. Innumerable minute stars, likened, as seen in the telescope, to particles of dust.
1844. Smyth, Cycle Celestial Objects, I. 307. In some straggling clusters the components are nearly of the same magnitude, but in others they are extremely different, the brighter individuals being apparently on a ground, as it were, of star dust, really ‘powdered with stars.’
1850. Nichol, Archit. Heav., 52. Masses still farther off may best be likened to a handful of golden sand, or, as it is aptly termed, star-dust.
1878. Newcomb, Pop. Astron., IV. i. 443. Many of them [these clusters] are so distant that the most powerful telescopes … show them only as a patch of star-dust.
2. Meteoric matter in fine particles supposed to fall upon the earth from space; ‘cosmic dust.’
1879. A. Geikie, Geol. Sk., xii. (1882), 323. Mud gathers on the floor of these abysses [of the ocean] … so slowly that the very star-dust which falls from outer space forms an appreciable part of it.
