Precambrian Noonday deposit in Mosaic Canyon, Death Valley

What's the oldest stuff you’ve ever seen, or better still, touched? Have you ever felt awe from contact with something of great antiquity? How old can stuff be? These are questions that have ravaged my mind since childhood.

I've always loved things of antiquity—antique objects, artifacts, fossils, and rocks. "Like." But what's that got to do with astronomy and space? Well, that's where all the oldest stuff originally comes from…but I'll get to that in a moment. First, an anecdote about old stuff.

In search of the oldest stuff, there I was at Badwater, in Death Valley, the lowest point in the continental US (the place where you crane your neck and strain your eyes to make out the words "Sea Level" on the sign waaaay up the cliff). Not far off, to the south, an alluvial fan slouched off into the salt pan, issuing from an unseen but obviously existent canyon in the mountains that make up the east wall of the valley.

I had learned at the visitor center that those mountains (the Black Mountains) are made of some very old rock: Precambrian rock that was originally laid down about 1.7 billion years ago!

So, up the alluvial fan I scramble, turn left, and up the deep, narrow canyon that the alluvium betrayed…

…to the base of a dry waterfall…

…to a wall of raw, exposed rock, the very bones of the Black Mountains…

…and reach out a hand, pressing palm and fingers firmly to the stuff.

Ahh….

1.7 billion years old; that rock I touched had been rock (albeit slowly transforming) for over a third of Earth's existence, and over a tenth the age of the universe itself. I don't know about you, but I find that awesome! And I had my hand right on it!

When we talk about the age of a rock, it is measured from the time the rock solidified ("aggregated"), either with the cooling of molten lava or magma, or the solidification of sediment. Finding really old rocks on Earth is complicated by weather and geologic processes, which continually transform, bury, and "disaggregate" them. Even so, very old rock can be found in certain places, like Greenland, Canada, Australia, and Africa. We're talking about ages between 2.5 and 3.8 billion years, and maybe more. I'd like to get my hand on some of that!

Get away from Earth and its rock-disaggregating processes and you can find some much older stuff. On the Moon, pretty much all of the material you find lying about is at least twice as old as that stuff I put my hand on at the base of the Black Mountains. On the Moon, significant surface activity (volcanism, bombardment by asteroids) ended some 3 billion years ago, and since then the crust has remained more or less unchanged, other than alterations caused by the occasional meteorite impact. The youngest rocks on the Moon are about the same age as most of the Earth's oldest stuff.

We even have a piece of that old stuff at Chabot: a chunk of 3.3 billion year old basalt brought back by Apollo 15 astronauts–and the only things that separate my hand from its speckly gray surface are two panes of glass and some nitrogen gas. Alas!

Get out to an asteroid or a comet and you may very well be setting foot on stuff that's over 4.5 billion years old, unchanged since the formation of our solar system! Within our solar system, that's about as old as stuff gets, but venture beyond it, perhaps to a planetary system that is older than ours, and you'll undoubtedly find older stuff! (This blog post is beginning to ring of George Carlin material.)

But what's the oldest stuff? I can't give you a rock of age beyond a certain point in time, because it took the early universe some time to develop the elements needed to build rocks-as-we-know-them, through nucleosynthesis in the cores of stars. Before that time, the only "stuff" around (at least that we would recognize as stuff; we won't go into dark stuff right now) was hydrogen and helium, which cannot by themselves a rock make.

But that primordial hydrogen and helium, the original building blocks of all material substances, has been around almost from the beginning of time, 13.7 billion years ago, soon after the Big Bang burst forth on the scene (whatever scene that may have been). Hydrogen, found in every water molecule in every glass of water you drink, in vast abundance within the oceans and waterways of the Earth, and through and through your own body, head to toe, is stuff we live and breathe, and is as old as the universe itself!

I don't know about you, but I find that spine-tingling.

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. (Photo: NASA)

The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.

I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.

The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.

At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.

"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."

McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."

And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.

Searching for a "Holy Grail"

McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."

Inside NASA's SOFIA Observatory, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.

"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.

That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.

"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.

But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.

A Star on the Way Out

As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. McLean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.

"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.

7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.

"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."

From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."

As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now undergoing service upgrades and then will return to the skies three times a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get on board.

Moon today and during the Cretaceous

Although I am a lifelong fan of science, I've also been a lifelong fan of science fiction—so I sometimes experience conflict in the DMZ where the two meet.

Having been raised on Star Trek, where the science and technology routinely violate known scientific principles (faster than light warp drive, for example), I learned to have leniency on some of those violations—at least, the ones that exist in order to make the story work.

But the stories that get the science completely wrong, for no good reason, get my militia up in arms….

Such was my reaction when, a few weeks ago, I happened upon the last two minutes of the series premiere of a new television show—the one that involves time-traveling colonists going 85 million years into the past to live among the dinosaurs. (Don’t ask me any more about the plot; I’ve only ever caught the last two minutes of each show when I change the channel to wait for House. All I know is each episode seems to end with people creeping through a jungle at night carrying torches….)

So what irked me so badly? Scene: colonists in settlement in Cretaceous jungle, night time, looking up at the starry, Moon-adorned sky. A child muses, "Is that the Moon?" (never having seen it before). "It’s so big!" Indeed, the Moon aloft in these prehistoric skies was depicted as truly huge—I’d estimate ten or fifteen degrees across, about the width of your hand spread wide at arm’s length (20 to 30 times the size of the Moon we know).

Enter "brainy" teenage girl to explain: The Moon is moving away from the Earth a few centimeters each year, so here, 85 million years in the past, it’s much closer to Earth.

How much closer was the Moon to Earth 85 million years ago? Do the math, brain: The Moon is currently moving away from the Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year, so 3.8 cm for 85 million years equals 323 million centimeters. Sounds like a lot, right? 323 million of just about anything seems like a lot. 323 million centimeters is 3,230,000 meters, or 3,230 kilometers. Or a little over 2,000 miles—which, coincidentally, is about the diameter of the Moon itself. Since the Moon is presently 240,000 miles from Earth, being 2000 miles closer to us in the past (about 0.8%) would not have made it perceptibly larger—let alone appearing as big as a cantaloupe!

The Moon has been moving away from the Earth since its formation, which took place about four and a half billion years ago. Through tidal interactions with the Earth, the Moon has "stolen" some of Earth’s rotational momentum (spin) to gradually boost itself farther and farther away, slowing the Earth’s spin as a result. Back in the day when the Earth and Moon were young and fresh—and much closer together—the Earth spun much faster: maybe once in 8 hours. (But that was WAY before life existed, so try not to imagine the dinosaurs experiencing much shorter days, please.)

Oh yeah, in that same two minutes of the show premiere, the "brainy" girl (it’s not her fault; it’s the show’s writers, of course) also had an answer for why all the stars in the Cretaceous sky bore no resemblance to the constellations we know today. The Universe is expanding, she said (correctly), and so in 85 million years that expansion has caused the stars to change position" (not so correctly). The Universe is expanding, yes, correct; the stars in Earth’s skies 85 million years ago would have looked completely different, yes. But the two have nothing to do with each other.

The Universe is expanding and carrying all of the galaxies and galaxy clusters farther and farther apart. But this has no effect on the stars gravitationally bound within each galaxy. At the scale of a single galaxy, like our own Milky Way, the gravity binding the stars together in that great spinning spiral overpowers the effect of space expanding.

The stars we see in our skies are all inside of our galaxy, to which they are gravitationally bound. It is merely the motion of those stars within the galaxy as they orbit the center that change their relative positions, and so the patterns of constellations that we perceive. Analogously, continental drift on Earth may move a pair of land masses away from each other, but that large-scale motion won’t cause the trees within either of those lands to move apart.

Nit picking? Yeah, maybe. But I even do it to Star Trek on occasion….

Centuries ago the stars were believed to reside just beyond the planets of our solar system.

How do we know how far away celestial objects are? This shouldn't be taken for granted, as it's not as straightforward as sounding the depth of the ocean floor with sonar, or determining the range to an object by bouncing radio waves off it and timing the reflection.

In fact, we have "pinged” the nearest celestial objects with radar to determine their distances very accurately. Examples are the Moon and Venus, where round-trip lightspeed travel is measured in seconds or minutes.

Before radar, the scale of the Solar System had to be determined geometrically, by observing events like Venus or Mercury transiting the face of the Sun from different locations on Earth and triangulating. Even this technique requires telescopes, which we've had only four hundred years. Before that, figuring out distances to just about everything except the Moon was mostly guesswork. In fact, it wasn't too many centuries ago that the entire Universe was believed to be not much larger than the Solar System—the Sun and it's nine…excuse me…eight planets—as we know it today.

Once the distance from Earth to the Sun was figured out, that length (the "Astronomical Unit”) in effect became a basic measuring rod for working out distances to everything else, by one means or another.

As Earth orbits the Sun, the direction from which we see stars shifts minutely, and we can observe a small change in a star's position compared to the more distant "background” stars. You can see the same effect by holding a finger in front of your face and looking at it alternately with one eye, then the other.

The geometry of this observation is a simple triangle, whose base is the distance between your eyeballs and whose legs are the lines from each eyeball to your finger. By knowing the length of the base, and observing the change in viewing angle against the background, the length of the legs (distance from your eyeballs) can be calculated.

In the case of Earth and a nearby star, the "eyeballs” are the Earth at two ends of its orbit around the Sun (six months apart) and the "finger” is the star.

But this measuring of distance by "trigonometric parallax," as it's called, only works for the nearest stars, as the minute shift in the star's apparent position diminishes with distance.

As astronomers learned more about the distance to nearby stars, they determined how to relate their temperature and mass to their actual brightness, and it became possible to estimate the distance of many stars by measuring their apparent brightness, with an understanding of how the brightness of light weakens with distance.

To measure the depths of space between us and galaxies far, far away, in which individual stars are indistinguishable from the overall galactic glow, we can turn to certain types of supernovae: individual stars that temporarily shine brightly enough to be observed and measured. Like the flare of a match struck in the dark night, the brilliance of the flash reveals how far away the striker stands.

We have built up our knowledge of the Universe's vastness over the past couple centuries, working out the problem from the near to the far. Even as science and technology have made the world on which we live smaller, it has done exactly the opposite to the Universe….

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There is an awful lot of DNA stuffed into every cell.

Let's start out with people. Each human cell has around 6 feet of DNA. Let's say each human has around 10 trillion cells (this is actually a low ball estimate). This would mean that each person has around 60 trillion feet or around 10 billion miles of DNA inside of them.

The Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun. So your DNA could stretch to the sun and back 61 times. That is one person’s DNA.

The best estimate I could find of the world’s population of people is around 6.7 billion. When we multiply 10 billion miles of DNA by 6.7 billion, we end up with, well, a really big number. Something like 6.7 X 10¹⁹ or 67 quintillion miles. That is too big a number so let’s convert this to light years.

A light year is around 6 X 10¹² miles. So all human DNA would stretch 11.2 million light years. The closest star to Earth (besides the sun) is around 4.2 light years. So we shoot way past that! The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away from us so human DNA could stretch there and back two or three times.

What if we add the rest of the DNA on the planet? It would obviously be much farther but it is hard to calculate because we don’t know how many plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, etc. there are on the planet. We also don’t have detailed information about every species on Earth.

Let's add bacteria to the mix. I decided on this because we know how many cells are in a bacterium—one.

One number I saw was that there are 5 X 10³⁰ bacteria on Earth. Bacterial DNA tends to be a lot smaller than human DNA so there will be less of it per cell. Let's say on average there is 4 million base pairs of DNA/bacterium (this number could be off by a very lot). This translates to around .05 inch of DNA per bacterium which means you need to scrape together around 1.3 million bacteria to get a mile of DNA. So all the bacteria in the world have about 3.5 X 10²⁴ miles of DNA.

How far is 3.5 X 10²⁴ miles of DNA? Well, it is about 640 billion light years of DNA. The end of the observable Universe is about 14 billion light years away. So if we stretched out bacterial DNA it would go to the end of the Universe and back around 23 times. Of course it would be incredibly thin and so actually doesn't take up much space in the Universe.

So that's just human and bacterial DNA. (Well, mostly bacterial since human is so piddly in comparison.) I haven't added all of the rest of the DNA out there. I'll leave that to you.

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Are there more actually more stars in the sky, than there are
grains of sand on all the world's beaches?

Sitting on Limantour Beach at Point Reyes awhile back, watching the waves slosh in and out, listening to gulls and feeling very lazy, I found myself looking about me at all that sand, and wondering how it could possibly be true. Reaching out, scooping up a mere handful of grains and letting–what?–a few hundred thousand of the would-be star proxies fall through my fingers, the notion seemed even more absurd.

Raising my eyes from the bit of the cosmos cupped in my hand and taking in the comparatively vast reaches of sand about me–a hundred or so feet between me and the waves, at least a mile or two of beach visible to the north, another stretch to the south, and who knows how many feet of depth beneath the surface? I simply couldn’t believe it. So, I pulled out my journal and started to write down some figures, working out the problem rationally.

So, is it true? Well, here's what I came up with:

Stars: Astronomers have estimated that there are about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Galaxies come in many sizes, both much larger and considerably smaller than our home galaxy. I don't know what the average number of stars in each galaxy is, but for the sake of this calculation I chose a conservative 10 billion stars per galaxy. Astronomers have also estimated that there are between 50 billion and 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, based on observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Again being conservative, I chose the lower figure of 50 billion. So, with those numbers, I calculate a number of stars in the Universe at 10 billion times 50 billion, or 500 billion billion—or in exponential notation, 5 X 10²⁰.

So how does the number of sand grains in the entire world's beaches stack up against that?

To get to that number, I had to do some estimation. First, pulling some numbers out of the air, I decided that an average sandy beach is 30 meters wide (about 100 feet), and 10 meters deep (about 33 feet). Some beaches are wider, some much less so. I don't imagine that the sand on the average beach is as deep as 10 meters—but I've never taken a shovel and found out, either.

Next, I assume that the average sand grain is a millimeter across, giving it a volume of about a cubic millimeter. With that number, I figure the sand grain density to be 1000³, or one billion, sand grains per cubic meter of beach.

The final piece of the equation–after density, width, and depth–is length: the total length of beach shorelines in the entire world. Here's where I made some serious assumptions. Starting with the total length of shorelines of all continents and islands in the world, I got a figure of 356,000 kilometers from the CIA World Factbook. That's 356 million meters.

Now here's where my estimate becomes truly conservative. In my final calculation, I assumed that all 356 million meters of world coastline consisted of sandy beaches– which is not the case, of course; there are plenty of coastlines that are rocky, pebbly, gravely, ice-covered, or sheer cliffs, all without much, if any, sand.

So what were my results? Well, doing the math, 1 billion grains per cubic meter times a 30 meter beach width times a 10 meter beach depth times a 356 million meter beach length and assuming 100% of the coastlines consist of my hypothetical average beach, I get:

1 billion x 30 x 10 x 356 million x 100% = 1.068 x 10²⁰ grains of sand

Compared to the estimate of stars in the Universe, that's about 5 times as many stars in the Universe as grains of sand in all the beaches in the world! I guess the old adage was not only right, but somewhat of an understatement…

But it's all a thing of scale. I also calculated that there are about 3000 times as many water molecules in a glass of water than there are stars in the Universe…

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The universe is made of stories.

The Universe Is Made of Stories
I think the central story of Christianity is not one of the parables of Jesus, or even his death and resurrection, but a simple story of a meal shared with friends. The story goes like this: Jesus took a loaf of bread in his hands, blessed it, broke it, and shared it with those around him. This story tells me how to live a good life. If I take each moment as it comes, if I enter into the moment, if I don't hold back, if I share the moment with those around me, then I am living a good life–solving a problem at my job, sharing the road on my way home, sharing dinner with my wife, reading a good novel while she practices at the piano, making love, taking out the trash, and walking the dog.

Religious people argue with atheists and scientific materialists over the existence of God. Agnostics, people who may have a sense of the sacred in their lives, who claim to be spiritual, but not religious, reject any formal organization of religious thought and practice. There is truth in every perspective, but I want to try to answer the atheists and the agnostics. I'll use poet Muriel Rukeyser in my answer to the atheists. She wrote "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." There are scientific stories, such as the Big Bang theory about the origins of the universe, or Sir Isaac Newton's story of a canon ball's trajectory from the mouth of a canon. And there are religious stories like the one I described above. Scientific stories and religious stories are qualitatively different. Maybe scientific stories tell us how things work and religious stories tell us how to live a good life.

In my answer to the agnostics I will use poetry as well. Poetry is particular. Jane Kenyon wrote a poem about a man in a coffee shop eating yogurt out of a container with a white plastic spoon. She could have written about eating in general, but I don't think it would have made a very interesting poem. Religion is particular and interesting, while spirituality is general and boring. Someone who samples a number of religious traditions is still being religious, I think. They just may be missing the benefit of going deeply into any one tradition.

Religious traditions tell different stories about what it is to be human and what it means to live a good life in a particular culture. I wonder if Catholicism would make more sense in Asian cultures if, instead of using bread in the Mass, we used rice cakes. Christianity took root in Latin America only after the Blessed Mother appeared to Juan Diego, a poor peasant, in the form of a "mestiza," a woman of mixed European and American Indian descent. Buddhism, with its story of Siddhartha finding enlightenment beneath the Bodi tree, seems to make perfect sense to many people in the West, and many people in the West find enlightenment and wisdom through the Sufi poet Rumi, an excellent story teller. The central Jewish story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt has had meaning for other oppressed peoples, especially those in Latin America.

I think the universe is made of stories–scientific and religious types of stories. I could not imagine life without either one of them.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

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