Meteorites offer more than a flash in the sky. They often carry presolar grains, also known as stardust. Get your hands on stardust, as Emilie Dunham ’14, PhD, strives to do, and you can learn a lot about our solar system and how we came to be.

Dunham is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she specializes in meteorites. In a profile in the lab’s magazine Spotlight, she talked about her fascination with the space rocks and how it was stoked at Case Western Reserve University.

“Meteorites are at this intersection of astronomy, geology, chemistry, and physics, so you have to learn a bit of everything, which I really enjoy,” she said.

Childhood stargazing with her father inspired her to major in astronomy at Case, where a class on meteorites led to her doctoral research at Arizona State University. She followed her PhD with a month-long meteorite hunting expedition in Antarctica in 2019 as part of CWRU’s  Antarctic Search for Meteorites Team.

The experiences helped Dunham become part of a tiny group of researchers, maybe 30 in the world, exploring a scientific niche.

Meteorites are remnants of space rocks that survived a fall through our atmosphere before slamming into Earth. Many were formed, like snowballs, by collecting presolar grains as they travelled through space.

As an expert on these grains, Dunham studies some of the oldest material in the universe. The dust was made by stars before the formation of our sun and planets. So it offers insight into the material that makes up the solar system — and us.

“Only a small number of presolar grains have been measured for their age, and a few of those measured formed more than a billion years before the solar system, making them at least 5.5 billion years old,” Dunham said. “These are literally the oldest objects that humans have ever held in their hands.”