[meteorite-list] Christopher Cokinos New York Times piece on Perseid meteor shower

From: Howell, Kevin <Kevin.Howell_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:14:20 -0400
Message-ID: <201CCF880B8AE7498CF97ECCF91C856B016C0394_at_USOLDTMS018.PGROOT.COM>

In case you didn't see Christopher Cokinos's beautifully written Op Ed
piece in yesterday's NEW YORK TIMES on the Perseid meteor shower....
it's pasted below.


Dust in the (Cosmic) Wind

By CHRISTOPHER COKINOS
Published: August 11, 2009
Logan, Utah

THE Perseid meteor shower is summer's closing act, arriving in
mid-August like clockwork. For centuries, many Christians associated it
with the martyred St. Lawrence, whose feast day falls on Aug. 10, so
they called the display "the tears of St. Lawrence." By the mid-1800s,
the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli came to understand that
meteor showers are really comet dust - the "very minute particles that
they have abandoned along their orbit."

Meteor showers occur when Earth intersects with these so-called debris
trains at particular times of the year. In the case of the Perseids, the
meteor shower that peaks Wednesday and continues this week, the dust
comes from Comet Swift-Tuttle, whose remains appear to shower down from
the constellation Perseus as it moves across the northern sky.

Dust may seem less poetic than a saint's tears, but dust has stories to
tell.

The story of the solar system begins with dust: Stars died. They
exploded. Their remains gathered from far distances to start again.
Gravity took hold, and eventually dust, gas, ice and rocks congealed
into planets and other objects like comets, which sometimes sprinkle
Earth with their debris.

The dust of the Perseids flares up enough to get our attention each
August, because it moves through the atmosphere so quickly. Other cosmic
dust takes a more gentle stroll. Because their mass is so little
relative to their surface area, the smallest particles can actually find
their way down to the ground. As Donald Brownlee, an astronomer at the
University of Washington who studies cosmic dust particles, has noted,
"If you had lettuce for lunch, you probably ate a few."

In fact, as much as 40,000 tons of dust from space reaches the ground
every year. Some of it contains material from stars as well as organic
matter - carbon, amino acids and other building blocks of life.

The Indo-European base for the word "dust" is "dhus-no," which is
related to the base for "fury." That seems right. After all, it was a
dizzying dust storm some five billion years ago that gave rise to the
solar system and, ultimately, to us.

Christopher Cokinos, a professor of English at Utah State University, is
the author, most recently, of "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of
Shooting Stars."

Cokinos's THE FALLEN SKY is currently ranked on Amazon.com:
#1 in Books > Science > Astronomy > Solar System
#1 in Books > Science > Astronomy > Comets, Meteors & Asteroids
#2 in Books > Outdoors & Nature > Ecology > Star-Gazing

Amazon is currently selling the $27.95 hardcover for $18.45
(http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Sky-Intimate-History-Shooting/dp/158542720
9/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250104179&sr=8-1)

 

 

Kevin Howell

Associate Marketing Manager

Tarcher/Penguin

(212) 366-2539

375 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

Kevin.Howell at us.penguingroup.com

 

Check out our new online video channel, Tarcher Talks!

 

*Follow Tarcher on Twitter and on FaceBook (Tarcher Books-Penguin)

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Received on Wed 12 Aug 2009 03:14:20 PM PDT