The Stardust Revolution Read online

  Published 2012 by Prometheus Books

  The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars. Copyright © 2012 by Jacob Berkowitz. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Trademarks: In an effort to acknowledge trademarked names of products mentioned in this work, we have placed ® or ™ after the product name in the first instance of its use in each chapter. Subsequent mentions of the name within a given chapter appear without the symbol.

  Cover image of the Tycho supernova remnant originally by

  MPIA/NASA/Calar Alto Observatory and modified by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

  (unaltered image available in photo insert)

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berkowitz, Jacob.

  The stardust revolution : the new story of our origin in the stars / byJacob Berkowitz.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978–1–61614–549–1 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–61614–550–7 (ebook)

  1. Exobiology. 2. Life--Origin. 3. Stellar dynamics. 4. Cosmology. I. Title.

  QH326.B47 2012

  523.1--dc23

  2012023387

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  Prologue. Extreme Genealogy

  Notes for the Journey

  PART 1. BORN OF STARS

  Chapter 1. The Stardust Revolution

  Meeting Lucy Ziurys

  The Third Great Revolution

  The Origins of the Stardust Revolution

  New Ways of Thinking

  New Ways of Seeing

  Beyond the Impossible

  Chapter 2. A Star's Fingerprint

  Looking at the Sun

  The Great Seer

  Out of Mystery

  Bunsen's Burnings

  Mystery of the Fraunhofer Lines

  Order in the Heavens

  A Stranger in the Stars

  Chapter 3. The Origin of the Elements

  Of Stars and Atoms

  The Alchemist's Dream

  A Recipe for Sunshine

  Big-Bang Atoms

  Let There Be Hoyle

  The Astronomer's Periodic Table

  Nobel Conclusions

  PART 2. THE INVISIBLE UNIVERSE

  Chapter 4. The Atoms of Life

  Darwin's Gap

  On the Origin of Life

  The Spontaneous-Generation Debate

  An Elemental View of Life

  Molecular Evolution

  The Earth in Glass

  Liftoff for Exobiology

  Chapter 5. Dust to Diamonds

  The Original Dark Matter

  A New Land between the Stars

  Seeing with Stardust Eyes

  The Cold and Dirty Cosmos

  The Dusty Missing Link

  Chapter 6. The Cosmos Goes Green

  Tuning In to Molecules

  Radio Whispers from the Universe

  Cosmic Water Man

  The Cosmic Sea

  Joining Heaven and Earth

  Red Giants and White Dwarfs

  PART 3. THE LIVING COSMOS

  Chapter 7. Catching Stardust

  The Space-Rock Education of Scott Sandford

  The Birth of the Earth

  The Men Who First Held Stardust

  Stardust Memories

  Sagan's Dream

  DNA from Space

  From Eternity to Here

  Tracing Our Cosmic Carbon Ancestry

  Chapter 8. Other Worlds

  New Frontiers

  A New Vision

  Dr. Seuss's Universe

  Alien Earth

  Chapter 9. Darwin and the Cosmos

  The Biological Big Bang

  What Is “Life”?

  Life as a Cosmic Continuum

  Bunsen and Kirchhoff's Gift

  An Ancient View with Stardust Eyes

  Photo Inserts

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  I 've always felt the tug of questions of identity, of who and what I am. These questions ring all the more loudly in middle age: I see parts of me emerging in my son's gangly adolescent limbs, and my father's septuagenarian facial traits are reflected in the mirror. I see a long line of connection, of which I am one bead along the string. For me, this long string of connection is a story, and this book is one telling of that story.

  It didn't start out that way. I thought I was writing a book about the intersection of evolutionary biology and astronomy. But in the strangest way, this book is a form of shared autobiography.

  The Stardust Revolution is the story of the greatest genealogical search of all time. It's extreme genealogy. It's extreme in terms of time, connecting us back to the very beginnings of time and space in the big bang. It's extreme in what it tells us about the nature of our ancestors. They were stars. We usually think of genealogy in terms of readily recognizable traits—“She has her grandmother's eyes,” or “He's a beanpole, just like his dad.” In extreme genealogy, the traits we're talking about aren't recognizable in family photos or with a glance in the mirror. It's not our hair color or the shape of our hands that's of interest. The elements are more fundamental: the types of atoms from which we're composed, the chemical bonds between them, the molecules that make up our cells. This is how our indelible stardust heritage is apparent in our blood and bones.

  In pulling together the disparate threads that connect us to the past, genealogists follow various trails of evidence. There are the documents, including birth, marriage, and death certificates. There's the living memory, such as a grandmother's amazingly clear recollections of her grandmother from the previous century. There are the tidbits of other written records—perhaps a name from a ship's registry at Ellis Island, an obituary in a newspaper, a name chiseled into a gravestone. But, at some point in the genealogical searching, the trunk of the family tree ends with nameless ancestors. Here genealogy turns into history, history into archaeology, archaeology into anthropology, and eventually our genealogical search digs down into paleontology and geology. The trail of ancestral evidence turns from specific ancestors to broad communities, to continents, to shards of bone that denote a prehistoric hominid species, to fossils in four-hundred-million-year-old rock that record some of the first footsteps on land, to molecular speculation about LUCA—the Last Universal Common Ancestor, an ancient single-celled organism that might bind together all animal life on Earth—and, finally, to billions-year-old rocks that record the Earth's emergence as a planet.

  There are strong links between genealogy, evolution, and origins, yet in day-to-day dealings they feel tenuous, if they're felt at all. The words are often used interchangeably, though they can mean very different things. We tend to think of ancestors as our immediate predecessors, those whose names appear on a family tree or at least in the kind of family legend that gets hauled out at holiday dinners, as in “George Washington was a distant relative.” In an evolutionary sense, we first look t
o the other primates as our closest genetic relatives, with whom we share distant relatives in ancient Africa. Then there are our origins, where evolution merges into a past so remote it feels more metaphysical than real. Yet all three—genealogy, evolution, and origins—fundamentally shape our personalities (“She's got her grandfather's temper”), our health (childbirth turned into a daredevil act by our mammalian propensity to give birth to live, large-brained babies), and ultimately by our very being as agglomerations of certain kinds of atoms and molecules that only together experience joy and anguish, as well as the mystery of sentient consciousness.

  A common experience in genealogical research is that while digging into our past we discover that our origins are different than we'd thought. The true story of our past has been lost over time, neglected in boxes in attics and basements, or perhaps hidden. A black woman may discover a white great-grandparent; or the Muslim, a Jewish forefather; the adopted child may find that her mother was aboriginal. We don't always welcome these revelations. A new genealogical discovery connects us differently to the world. Perhaps a culture that was once fully “other” becomes part of “me.” Maybe a distant land that was completely foreign and of no interest becomes a homeland. Someone in our neighborhood who we liked, or disliked, may become a distant relative. In gaining this knowledge, we are exactly the same yet somehow different. When we look in the mirror, we see ourselves a little differently. Suddenly there's new meaning in the shape of our nose or lips, the color of our hair or eyes. In knowing, we are given a choice: to accept this new view of ourselves or to deny, ignore, or reject it.

  Genealogy is about the transfer of information, the genetic information that makes us who we are: tall, short, big-boned, sickly. This information is embedded in our DNA. We may think of DNA as the genetic information molecule, but DNA itself is a book made up of various words and sentences. Each of its atomic and molecular parts has its own characteristics in the ways it prefers to bond, in the energy of these bonds, in how it vibrates, in how it breaks. It's these chemical characteristics that make DNA what it is, that make us what we are. So, we ask: What shaped DNA? What is its heritage? It's the next step back in the family tree that takes us to the stars. DNA molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life, find their parentage, their essence, not here on Earth but in the broader cosmos. They are the language of the universe, the way the cosmos expresses itself. The information they inherited comes from the nature of the stars and the cosmic ecology that birthed them.

  Many ancient cultures intuited an intimate, living connection between the heavens and the Earth. The cycles of the seasons were measured by the movements of stars and constellations at sacred sites, from Stonehenge in England to Machu Picchu in Peru. Women's cycles of waxing and waning fertility were in tune with the fattening and shrinking of the Moon. Many cultures worshipped the Sun and Moon as divine foreparents, father Sun and mother Moon. The Sun and Moon were out there, untouchable and holy life-giving forces on whom our lives depended for guidance regarding not only when to plant and harvest but also the success of that harvest. We ate because of the Sun. Today, this connection to the cosmos is largely seen as mythic, as stories that ancient peoples concocted to explain their existence.

  Since Galileo first used a telescope in 1609, we've been on a voyage out, from the shores of the Earth into the cosmos. With our eyes, we've traveled farther into space and deeper into time, reaching the very beginnings of time: the big bang. Voyages often change the traveler. How have we been shaped by our collective journey, and what have we discovered? To my mind, one amazing realization is foremost: we thought we were exploring “outer space,” but we are finding our deepest selves. The 1972 Apollo 17 image of the whole Earth from space—the photograph of the big, blue marble—deeply shaped our view of ourselves as planetary beings. This realization fueled both the environmental movement and a swell of planetary consciousness that's still building. It is one view of ourselves, as an isolated planet, alone in the blackness of space. The Stardust Revolution is providing a complementary image of humanity: not as alone and different but as intimately connected with—indeed, born of—the cosmos.

  Through extreme genealogy, we've come to understand a new story of ourselves: the story of our origin in the stars. When we look at images of countless distant galaxies, glimmering planetary nebulae, or the shimmer of the Milky Way, we are looking at family photographs. We are separated by great distances of time and space and are not direct relations. We feel as different as we do from some multi-eyed, antennaed Cambrian creature preserved in the rock of the Burgess Shale. Yet, if we open ourselves to what we've discovered on our journey out, we come to see that the greatest discovery is not what's out there but rather how we're part of it. The guiding question of the Stardust Revolution isn't “Are we alone?” but rather “How are we connected?”

  Ancient mariners looked to the stars to determine where they were. In the Stardust Revolution, we're realizing that the stars are guides to who and what we are. If we discover other life, it will not be alien; rather, it will be distantly related to us. We already find it difficult on Earth to understand our shared humanity, the deeply shared nature of black and yellow, white and red, man and woman—and we find it easy enough to detect aliens on Earth based on differences in culture, language, and nationality. This is the heart of the Stardust Revolution: it's as much about ourselves as it is about what's out there. We are stardust; the stars are our ancestors. When we look at the sparkle in a baby's eyes, we're seeing the reflected twinkle of long-ago stars shining once again.

  Searching for our genealogical roots always eventually brings us to foreign lands, times, cultures, and languages. With the extreme genealogy of the Stardust Revolution, we quickly find ourselves in distant cosmic realms where the language that's used to describe it is that of astrophysics.

  Taking an astrophysical genealogical journey is a trip, by Earth standards, into the land of extremes. You can leave behind your wristwatch, notions of a country mile, or thoughts of a cold day being one on which you see your breath in chilled morning air. On this trip, temperature, distance, and time are measured in ways we don't use in day-to-day activities. This is not to say that these conditions are somehow “other,” but rather that, in understanding our cosmic heritage, we see that we embody astrophysical extremes.

  To describe temperature, astrophysicists generally use neither the familiar Celsius nor Fahrenheit temperature scales but rather the Kelvin scale. The Kelvin temperature scale is calibrated in relation to absolute zero, the temperature at which atoms stop moving. On our genealogical journey, finding ourselves somewhere really cold—say, inside a dense molecular cloud from which solar systems are born—is to be at about 15 degrees Kelvin. That's approximately –433°F, or –258°C. For our purposes, all temperatures in this book are described in degrees Fahrenheit. I hope that for readers more familiar with the Celsius scale, –433°F will register simply as cosmically cold.

  For the Stardust Revolution story, distances are often best described in light-years. A light-year is the distance a photon of light travels in one Earth year. Since light travels at the constant speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second, or approximately 186,282 miles per second, this distance is about 10 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles—huge numbers more simply described as a light-year. For comparison, the distance from the Sun to the Earth is about 8 light-minutes, or 93 million miles.

  In this book, when smaller distances, sizes, or masses are involved, I’ve generally used the American Imperial measurement system of miles, inches, and pounds. However, when it comes to sizes and masses, I’ve used metric measurements when the original research did so, such as using nanograms or billionths of a gram to describe the mass of a grain of stardust. Again, I hope that for readers more familiar with other units of measurement the key message will be clear that something is either infinitesimal or enormous.

  Cosmic genealogical time is a mix of the atomic-clock fast and the seemingly eternal.
On the one hand, there are the atomic transformations in exploding stars that take place in billionths of a second; on the other, there are the interstellar wanderings of stardust that can take millions or billions of years before a single grain becomes the stuff of a star or planet. Nineteenth-century geologists tracing our evolutionary roots had to get used to talking about deep time measured in hundreds of millions of years. On our extreme genealogical search, pushing back our origins to before the existence of the Earth, a million begins to feel a little like spare temporal change, and you get to dropping the term billion like a Wall Street investment banker.

  Now it's time for our journey.

  We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it.

  —Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang, 1997

  MEETING LUCY ZIURYS

  W hen I first met Lucy Ziurys in early December 2008, I was struck by the thought of what it would be like for a pre–World War II astronomer to meet her. He wouldn't believe she was of the same academic species. The time-traveling astronomer would think that he hadn't moved just through time but that he had also moved into a strange parallel universe. Ziurys's basement office in the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona would at first seem familiar enough. Every horizontal surface—her desk, the meeting desk—is covered with piles of papers, a clutter reminiscent of that of legions of scientists for centuries.

  But upon closer inspection and questioning, it would be clear to the visitor that this is a very strange future. For one, Ziurys is a woman, her shoulder-length, sandy-blonde hair is held back with a simple headband revealing a strong Nordic face with deep-set blue eyes. She has the direct bearing of a woman who has made her way in a field through dint of effort and will in what has squarely been a man's domain. A female astronomer with a prominent academic post, research funding, and a coterie of graduate students was unheard of until the latter part of the twentieth century. Yet our visitor might reflect that women had indeed played a major role in the laborious work of early twentieth-century astronomy and that Ziurys's occupation was thus not that strange.