Chapter 1: Stardust - Geology’s True Beginning

Minerals have origins far older than Earth itself. This introduction explains how elements formed in stars become the stardust that later builds planets and minerals.

Minerals Begin in Space

Minerals do not start on Earth. Their story begins in space, long before our planet existed.

Inside massive stars in their final stages, the tiny building-block particles of matter (protons, neutrons and electrons) fuse together to create the chemical elements we know today. These include carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron and many others that eventually become part of minerals.

When these stars reach the end of their life, they explode in a supernova. This explosion spreads their newly formed elements across space in the form of stardust, which is extremely fine matter floating through the galaxy.

Clouds, Disks and First Planets

Over millions of years, this stardust gathers into large clouds of gas and dust. Under the pull of gravity¹, these clouds collapse and begin to spin, forming a protoplanetary disk, which is a rotating disk of gas and dust around a new star. Our Solar System began in this way.

Inside this spinning disk, dust grains stick together. Small pieces grow into larger pieces. Over time they turn into rocks and then into bodies called planetesimals, which are the earliest building blocks of planets. Many of these combined to form the young Earth.

The early Earth was extremely hot and existed as a ball of molten rock. As it slowly cooled, the outer layer began to harden into the first crust. This created the conditions needed for the first minerals to form.

For now, it is enough to understand this simple idea. Every mineral that exists, including Quartz, Garnet and Ruby, began as stardust. Their structures preserve the conditions of ancient stars, early dust clouds and the first solid material of the Solar System. Understanding this origin gives context to their beauty and to the immense timescales behind them, setting the foundation for everything that geology explains afterward.

This is the true beginning of geology.

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Footnote

¹ Even tiny particles of stardust have a small amount of mass, and anything with mass creates gravity. When millions of such particles gather in a cloud, their combined mass produces a gentle gravitational pull. Over long periods of time, this pull causes the cloud to slowly draw itself together. As the center becomes denser and hotter, a new star is born. The remaining material around it forms a spinning disk of gas and dust, and this disk eventually creates planets.