Moonseed
Chapter One
It began in a moment of unimaginable violence, five billion years before humans walked the Earth.
There was a cloud, of gas and dust, slowly spinning. Much of it was the hydrogen and helium which had emerged from the Big Bang itself, but it was tainted by crystals of ice--ammonia, water and methane--and dust motes rich in iron, magnesium and silica, even some grains of pure metal. These were flotsam from older stars, stars already dead.
. . . And now another star died, a giant, in the conclusive spasm of supernova. A flood of energy and matter hammered into the cloud.
The cloud lost its stability, and began to collapse, to a spinning disc. The central mass shone cherry red, then gradually brightened to white, until--after a hundred million years--it burst into fusion life.
It was the protostar which would become the sun.
Within the disc, solid particles began to crystallize. There were grains of rock--silicate minerals called olivines and pyroxenes--and minerals of iron and nickel, kamacite and taenite. The particles, stuck together by melting ice, formed planetesimals, muddy lumps which swarmed on looping, irregular ... read full excerpt from: Moonseed ebook
