A CATHEDRAL roof is the perfect place to seek out cosmic dust, planetary experts say. Test samples taken from Canterbury and Rochester Cathedrals have up to now revealed a wealthy deposit of micrometeorites.
“It could easily be taken for an April Fool’s hoax, but it surely’s really not,” the Dean of Rochester, the Very Revd Dr Philip Hesketh, told the Church Times this week. “We had no idea this material was there on our roof, but the unique constructing dates from 604 with further construction within the twelfth century; so there have to be several centuries of particles and debris together with all of the history.”
‘I’ve been up on the roof and removed all that dust ultimately’
A planetary scientist and member of the project team on the University of Kent, Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz, said that the dust was initially collected with a dustpan and brush, but a special vacuum cleaner was now being deployed.
“Cathedrals are large areas,” she said, “and so they have been collecting for a very long time. Cosmic dust is mixed in with far greater quantities of terrestrial dust, however the proportion that’s from space, and the number of various cosmic varieties, is more likely to be greater on a cathedral than a house.”
The appeal of cathedrals pertains to their roofs’ being large, often inaccessible, and mainly untouched for long periods of time. Cathedral resources may steadily assist the dating process through consultation of their records and archives.
About 13 cathedrals have been identified for space-dust collection, subject to funding. The research is meant to find more about how oceans and life are formed on earth. Some samples are already showing grains as much as seven billion years old from other solar systems, which entered our own system after its birth 4.6 billion years ago.
It is estimated that greater than 100 million meteorite particles land on the planet every year. Dr Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College, London, said that the fragments offered “details about how life and oceans developed on Earth; the asteroids and comets which have produced cosmic dust can have been the constructing blocks. . . They are in every single place. We may have cosmic dust on our clothes. But also surrounding us are billions of odd terrestrial dust particles, making it hard to detect cosmic dust.”
The collection of cosmic dust is barely the beginning of the research process. Scientists should sift it out from terrestrial material by identifying signs of exposure to radiation from the sun and the remainder of the galaxy. The bags of dust first undergo sterilisation to make them secure to work with and prepared for the scientific examination of every particle under a sterile microscope.
Dean Hesketh is looking forward to what the research might yield, from Rochester and other cathedrals. “Anything that helps increase our wider understanding of the universe is welcome news, even when the research team does look very funny on the roof of the nave with a vacuum cleaner.”
