Retracing the stardust trail

Marcus Chown, contributor

THE iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen that fills your lungs each time you take a breath - all were forged in stars that lived and died before the Earth was born. You are stardust made flesh. You were literally made in heaven.

The story of the nuclear processes that built the elements in your body was essentially told in a seminal paper in 1957 by Fred Hoyle, William Fowler, and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge. I recounted the story in my book, The Magic Furnace, which science writer Jacob Berkowitz draws on for The Stardust Revolution. But Berkowitz does not just bring the story up to date: he broadens it, exploring what we have discovered about the 9 billion years of history that preceded Earth's birth.

The key to his story is stardust. It is on the super-cold surfaces of such silicate or ice grains that atoms are stitched together to make a wide range of molecules. These molecules radiate heat, which causes gas clouds to collapse to form suns. Later, those molecules, still stuck to stardust, rain down on planets, providing the building blocks of biology.

In this impressively researched and exciting book, Berkowitz talks to some of the key figures who have pieced together the pre-chemistry of the Earth, including 97-year-old Charles Townes, inventor of the maser -a microwave laser - and discoverer of water in space. But the real excitement is in the discovery of hundreds of planets around nearby stars. We are on the verge, Berkowitz thinks, of finding the missing piece in the picture: precisely how stardust led to life.

• The Stardust Revolution
• by Jacob Berkowitz
• Published by: Prometheus
• ?24.95/$27

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