Hunting for Stars (MCGRAW HILL HORIZONS OF SCIENCE SERIES)
Translated from the original French language edition (Hachette, Paris, 1993). The author is NASA's chief investigator for the study of lunar samples and research director at the French National Scientific Research Center. He is responsible for collecting micrometeorites in the hot and cold deserts of the world; in this clear presentation for the lay audience, he tells why his work is important. Lacks an index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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Could we have come from the stars? Some specialists in extraterrestrial matters ask: could meteorites - those mysterious black stones that fall from the sky and terrified the ancients - and micrometeorites - minuscule grains of cosmic dust new to the scientific scene - hold the secret of the origins of life? Would it not be a strange destiny for humans, who risk being decimated by an enormous meteorite - as were probably the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago - to have come into existence as a result of a primitive shower of billions upon billions of micrometeorites? Moreover, some of them contain star dust that is even older than the sun. They are therefore unique and fabulous archivists of our earliest history. To collect them - in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Australian and Sahara deserts - scientists have become "hunters of stars."
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