A touch of stardust
Discover how far Kent’s Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz and Dr Matthias van Ginneken were prepared to go to uncover the secrets of cosmic dust.
Kent’s academics are known for going the extra mile, whether helping students to reach their potential or working to extend understanding in their own fields, they’re interested in the big questions.
Questions don’t get much bigger than how did the solar system evolve and how did life on earth begin. If you’re looking to unlock those secrets, you have to be prepared to reach for the skies. For Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz and Dr Matthias van Ginneken, that meant climbing to the top of England’s two oldest cathedrals, Canterbury and Rochester, with their hoover(!) to gather extra-terrestrial cosmic dust.
So, what persuaded Penny and Matthias to make the pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral’s roof? As tiny as the particles are, cosmic dust contains fascinating information that can give scientists new insights into the evolution of the solar system. The dust comes from asteroids and comets, possibly formed as long as 4.6 billion years ago. They travel for thousands of years before smashing into our atmosphere at incredible speeds, when tiny distinctive spheres break off, eventually falling to earth.
Matthias told us what happens once the dust has been collected. ‘The dust is taken to the lab, cleaned and analysed. We use the particles to try and identify their “asteroid family” which gives us an idea of the inventory of matter in the solar system and its evolution. It may even be possible that cosmic dust supplied the building blocks of life on Earth.’
This is extraordinary dust then, but if it falls everywhere, why hoover on a rooftop? Over to Penny: ‘Rooftops give us the opportunity to collect the dust without it having been trampled on and cathedral rooftops are ideal because very good records of construction work are kept, so we can see how long they have been gathering dust.’
Penny and Matthias are among the pioneers of cosmic dust collection, but they’re keen to encourage others to get involved: ‘We’d love to build this into a citizen science project nationwide, even worldwide. Then it would be possible to compare the micrometeorites you find, look for different types and compare those found in different locations to see if there are any interesting patterns based on latitude for instance.’
Could it be that the secrets of life itself can be discovered in a handful of dust?
