Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System

An up-close and personal look at comets and how we can use these ancient voyagers to understand our place in the solar system.

Icy, rocky, sometimes dusty, always mysterious--comets and asteroids are among the Solar System's very oldest inhabitants, formed within a swirling cloud of gas and dust in the area of space that eventually hosted the Sun and its planets. Locked within each of these extra-terrestrial objects is the 4.6-billion-year wisdom of Solar System events, and by studying them at close quarters using spacecraft we can coerce them into revealing their closely-guarded secrets. This offers us the chance to answer some fundamental questions about our planet and its inhabitants.

Exploring comets and asteroids also allows us to shape the story of Earth's future, enabling us to protect our precious planet from the threat of a catastrophic impact from space, and maybe to even recover valuable raw materials from them. This cosmic bounty could be as useful in space as it is on Earth, providing the necessary fuel and supplies for humans as they voyage into deep space to explore more distant locations within the Solar System.

Catching Stardust tells the story of these enigmatic celestial objects, revealing how scientists are using them to help understand a crucial time in our history – the birth of the Solar System, and everything contained within it.

Natalie Starkey is a geologist, cosmochemist and science communicator. Natalie's doctorate at Edinburgh University on the geochemistry of Arctic volcanoes saw her travelling to the volcanic lava-fields of Iceland and the ancient volcanoes of northern Scotland, and she also spent time as a volcanologist on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. Later, Natalie's postdoctoral research expanded to include the analysis of rock samples from space, which led to her first popular science book, Catching Stardust (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018). Her latest book is Fire and Ice, an exploration of the volcanoes of the solar system.

Natalie received a British Science Association Media Fellowship in 2013 to work with the Guardian. She has been a science host on Neil deGrasse Tyson's popular StarTalk Radio, and is now Science Media Producer for Chemistry World at The Royal Society of Chemistry.

@starkeystardust / nataliestarkey.com