The Stardust Revolution
The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
In 1957, as Americans obsessed over the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, another less noticed space-based scientific revolution was taking off. That year, astrophysicists solved a centuries-old quest for the origins of the elements, from carbon to uranium. The answer they found wasn’t on Earth, but in the stars. Their research showed that we are literally stardust. The year also marked the first conference that considered the origin of life on Earth in an astrophysical context. It was the marriage of two of the seemingly strangest bedfellows—astronomy and biology—and a turning point that award-winning science author Jacob Berkowitz calls the Stardust Revolution.
In this captivating story of an exciting, deeply personal, new scientific revolution, Berkowitz weaves together the latest research results to reveal a dramatically different view of the twinkling night sky—not as an alien frontier, but as our cosmic birthplace. Reporting from the frontlines of discovery, Berkowitz uniquely captures how stardust scientists are probing the universe’s physical structure, but rather its biological nature. Evolutionary theory is entering the space age.
From the amazing discovery of cosmic clouds of life’s chemical building blocks to the dramatic quest for an alien Earth, Berkowitz expertly chronicles the most profound scientific search of our era: to know not just if we are alone, but how we are connected. Like opening a long-hidden box of old family letters and diaries, The Stardust Revolution offers us a new view of where we’ve come from and brings to light our journey from stardust to thinking beings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Astronomer Carl Sagan was famous for saying, "We are all starstuff," and award-winning Canadian science journalist Berkowitz shows how "the stars are our ancestors" in this intriguing look at what he calls "stardust science," a surprising blend of astronomy and evolutionary biology. Observations of our sun and other stars in the early 20th century surprised scientists with the knowledge that all stars were made from the same 27 elements. Nobel Prize winning physicist Hans Bethe explained how stars made those elements with "nuclear cookery," fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. The heaviest, like iron, came from elderly red giant stars and from the exploding stars known as supernovae to create the cosmic dust that was to coalesce into new stars and planets. Berkowitz (Jurassic Poop: What Dinosaurs Left Behind) explains how this recycled dust, which includes a surprising abundance of water molecules and sooty carbon grains, provides the perfect "cosmic test-tube" for interstellar chemistry, and the potential seeds for life itself. With an engaging tone and accessible science, Berkowitz shows how the current search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars could also reveal alien life born of the same dust that made us. Photos.
