[jameshart]

Be grateful these astronomers even made that distinction. They might have just said this stuff (or at least the parts of it that aren’t Hydrogen) was ‘metallic’ and left it at that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity

Seems like asteroid astrophysicists like to be a bit more specific about this stuff than their stellar and galactic astrophysicist colleagues.

[spindle]

Yes!

Happily, it's become okay for them to talk about astrobiology. It was mostly taboo until a few years ago. (Just speculating here, but I think it was the discovery of lots of exoplanets that caused astrobiology to become permissible.)

[dylan604]

being technically right is good, but if you want funding, it has to be way more sexy sounding than that.