We Are Stardust

NASA

"There is a wind that blows from the heart of dying stars, a wind so strong that it reshapes the atoms in its path and drives them out as spindrift into space." So begins this poetic piece on the ways the finding of a specific iron isotope on a rock brought up from the ocean floor ~ and the absence of a specific plutonium isotope on Earth ~ could change our theories about our planet and the history of the solar system. Even if it doesn't, the author says, the link such discoveries highlight between the geological and the cosmological, between the smallest thing we know and the largest, is a source of wonder and nuance: http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/oliver-morton/stars