What are dust bunnies made of, and where did they come from? Part 2

Shown here, sunny side down, is the James Webb Space Telescope.

It's a well-spent $10 billion dollars for a terrific bit of kit for paleodustbunnyology - the study of the ancient roots of the first dust bunnies - and apparently, it's handy for studying astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, astrochemistry, nucleosynthesis and quantum physics too.

From the Big Bang to the Big Tidy-up

It was just after Big Bang o'clock when first ever particles of matter condensed out of a rather hot soup composed of quarks bonded together with gluons.

Having discovered that dust bunnies are ultimately bags of quarks in various configurations we now have to follow the Universe's evolution from the creation of the first ever particles of matter to the first ever dust bunnies.

After the initial phooom it was too hot for matter to form so we have to fast forward as we wait for things to cool down.

400,000 years for the first atoms to glom together, 100 million years for the first stars to ignite, about a billion years for galaxies to coalesce. (New JWST data might yet make a liar out of me though.)

Then some more long-term thumb twiddling as we await the first supernova to go off.

But why do we have to wait for supernovae to go off?

It's elementary

Supernovae are such powerful explosions they forge new atomic elements (see chart below) and then blast the debris out into interstellar space.

Yet more multi-eon thumb-twiddling ensues while supernovae, cosmic rays and neutron stars seed the cosmos with the contents of the periodic table.

Weird molecules appear within the clouds of interstellar dust. Perhaps also the first molecules that'll evolve into the building blocks of life.

But still no dust bunnies yet.

The necessary ingredients and conditions for the very first proto-dust bunny

For primo dust bunny creating conditions in the Universe, a few more billion years will have to pass.

This is to allow standing time until we have rocky, metal-rich exoplanets with liquid water orbiting around a stable smallish sun.* 

Wait a bit longer until self-replicating, multi-cellular organisms ooze from the slime and start evolving and mutating.

The long-term winners of the bioslime's natural selection competition will then have to survive long enough to develop sufficient neural complexity from which consciousness, intelligence and fashion sense may emerge.

That's the crucial step; the species must survive long enough to develop a taste for practical, durable and above all, stylish clothes and accessories.

•Some other conditions may apply.

It's laundry but not as we know it

For the first dust bunnies to entangle, we'll need a populated planet with sufficient technology and water for laundry facilities as well as sentient lifeforms with a taste for fancy duds.

And just so there's a range of fabrics and materials available to shed the threads and fibres necessary for a dust bunny's entanglement a variable climate would help too.

With the change of weather our aliens will have to swap their winter-weight four-armed sweaters for their UV-resistant summer-weight onesies and that means laundry.

Our aliens might also ooze exudates or shed their cellular exodermis from time to time so their jim-jams and the sheets for the dormitory cocoons will have to get a quick wash and, if it's too rainy to air-dry outside, a tumble-dry as well.

Fluff everywhere - especially if gravity's a bit on the light side.

So in the relentless hunt for the Universe's earliest dust bunnies, the JWST harvests ancient data from the distant reaches of time and space.

However by the time the light gets to the JWST the Universe has expanded so much that travel weary photons lose some of their original bright cheery effervescence and descend into a surly dim redness that only a telescope in spaaace can detect.

Only the cold, cold infra-red sensors of the JWST can detect these faint whisps of dust bunny signals.

By analysing the wan light shining through the atmospheres of  far distant planets, the JWST spectroscopy camera might be able to pick out the signature of ‘stuff’ embedded in the planet’s spectrum.

The JWST continues its search for signs of laundry in the atmosphere of faraway planets.

But how much of what the JWST detects is simply the wreckage, ruins or scattered remnants and interstellar dust of past pan-galactic empires?

Are we looking at the detritus of civilisations that have come and gone, their names forgotten, their edifices crumbled and their songs lost into the infinite black void of eternity?

But the vacuum is never empty. All the dust that was ever previously created has been repeatedly put through the Cosmic Recycler only to reassemble eons later as the dust bunnies under your bed and behind your desk where you can't reach with your vacuum.

As Yarn told the young dust bunnies in the attic, dust will prevail.

The dust bunnies shuffled closer to Yarn, right up to him.

‘What you must learn is this: no matter what happens next week, when the repairman comes, no matter where the brush sweeps, dust will always prevail. It always has and always will.’

When the dust bunnies touched Yarn’s threads, the rafters and boxes of the dusty attic faded away. Black swirled and thickened around them. Tiny points of light began to pierce the gloom.

Oooh, space, thought Rayon to himself. And stars, too. I’ve seen them up high when the bright goes away. Didn’t realise it was quite so big though.

Like strings of fairy lights, slender strands of spinning and colliding galaxies draped themselves across millions of light years of velvety darkness. Ribbons of utter black spilled across bands of light, only to be blasted away by flowering waves of light revealing a nursery of sparkling points at the centre of it all.

‘This is dust at work. Making stars.’ Yarn’s voice rolled out across the roiling and boiling cosmos. ‘Stars are the littlest bits of dust getting together to do great things.’

The dust bunnies watched as a single bright light burst into being, brighter by far than all the other stars.

‘Supernova,’ explained Yarn. ‘Even when the dust has finished being a star, it’s still got work to do.’

Becoming brighter and brighter, the star bloomed silently into an expanding translucent sphere of light and glowing dust, a star’s last goodbye to the universe.

‘That’s what we are made of, the heart of stars rising from their ashes,’ said Yarn. ‘The smallest parts of our smallest fibres were forged in the heart of stars and will endure for the life of the universe.’

That was a big idea for a small dust bunny to come to terms with, so they all sat silently, slightly baffled and a bit awestruck.

‘Don’t take the pictures too seriously. That’s all nonsense,’ Yarn went on in a matter-of-fact kind of way. ‘This three-dimensional, immersive, high-resolution, time-lapsed, full-colour view trick. That’s just for demonstration purposes. The real universe doesn’t look like that at all. Not a bit. Much, much duller in real life. So boring, so very slow.’

That rather broke the magic of the moment and Yarn’s cosmos crumbled away to the very ordinary black of Yarn sitting in the shadows of the rafters in a dusty, poorly-lit attic.

Back in the reality of the attic, faced with the looming return of the central vac and a source of dubious information, Twill was exasperated. However, he did a good job of holding it in.

‘Not a lot of immediate tactical relevance though, this “forged in the heart of solar furnaces” stuff, is it?’ said Twill. ‘Not much in the way of practical applications. Utility factor low.’

‘Handy as a chocolate teapot,’ agreed Stour.

‘That cosmic starbunny twaddle. How exactly does that help us at all?’ Twill’s exasperation was starting to leak out a bit now.

‘Oh, it’s not all twaddle,’ Yarn replied. ‘Dust is forged in solar furnaces and tempered in the savage light and limitless heat of exploding suns uncountable years ago. We are made of resilient stuff, you and I.’

‘Even me?’ asked a delightedly baffled Knickers.

‘Indeed so.’

This thought pleased Knickers very much and she puffed up quite conspicuously. Rayon had obviously been thinking about all this, too.

‘So, from dust we come and to dust we go,’ he said. ‘Everything tends towards dust. Dust always prevails?’

‘Exactly, young Rayon,’ replied Yarn. ‘Well done.’

Hearing this, Twill threw up his threads in despair and rolled away before he said something he’d later regret.

‘And will dust prevail before, say, next week?’ asked Stour hopefully.

‘I’m afraid he’s right, Yarn,’ said Rayon. ‘What you told us doesn’t exactly help us with the central vac. What should we do?’

‘Do, young bunny? Do? Any doing is quite unnecessary. Don’t you fret, young dust bunnies. Dust will prevail. But perhaps not in the way you want,’ said Yarn with a yawn. ‘Or, indeed, in the way you expect. But yes, dust will prevail. Entropy has never failed us yet.’

This blog post made possible with support from the Angela Momentum Conservation Society.