AGU’s Walter Sullivan Award is given annually for work with a prep time of more than one week. This year, however, it’s being awarded for a story that has been eons in the making: the murky origins of chondrules, tiny glassy inclusions in certain meteorites that rank among the oldest solid objects to emerge within our solar system. Chondrules, it seems, are a microcosm of stellar and planetary formation; understand how they came to be during our own star’s infancy, and you may have gone a considerable way toward gaining answers to the greater question of how suns and worlds alike coalesce throughout the universe. It was fitting, then, that this story of some of the “first things” around the Sun was also the very first feature for Scientific American written by Jonathan O’Callaghan, one of our most prized contributors and one of the best space-centric science communicators working today. Jonathan is a consummate journalist — enormously productive, relentless in his reporting, crystal clear in his prose and above all deeply curious. He has a particularly remarkable knack for knowing not only what makes a good story but also when it is best told. In the case of this article, “Asteroid Dust from Hayabusa2 Could Solve a Mystery of Planet Creation,” the catalytic calendrical event was the return to Earth of precious samples from a space rock, Ryugu, by a Japanese spacecraft on 6 December 2020. Jonathan’s interest in the topic was initially piqued after he stumbled across a few obscure chondrule-related studies while combing through thousands of presentation abstracts for a science conference in early summer of 2020. Soon, he realized that the impending climax of the Hayabusa2 mission also offered a unique opportunity to spotlight the science of chondrules because eventual studies of the returned samples would reveal their presence — or absence — from Ryugu. Either way, the results would provide important new clues about the conditions of chondrules’ primordial births. Most journalists would shy away from such a complex and challenging topic, daunted by the dry technical details and subtleties that can all too easily stifle the crafting of a compelling narrative. Jonathan, as usual, did just the opposite, diving into the depths of the international community of chondrule researchers. Consulting many of this rarefied subfield’s brightest minds, he deftly wove a tale combining several of their fascinating personal stories with the broader research landscape they inhabit, revealing its surprising history, current status and hopefully bright future. 

— Lee Billings Scientific American New York, New York

Response

The life of a freelance space journalist is a strange one. We do not report on the big, headline-making news; if or when we find alien life, it'll probably be one of the quietest moments of my career. Rather, we spend our time looking for those stories that have gone unnoticed, intriguing and obscure scientific discoveries hidden in scientific journals or tales from a research field that have received little interest.
My article that has won this year's Walter Sullivan Award is a mix of the two.

Chondrules are not particularly enticing at first glance — they are tiny seedlike rocks, found inside meteorites, of which we have thousands upon thousands in our collection. Yet they are fascinating. No one is quite sure how they formed, but we know they did so at the dawn of the solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. Understanding their origin could thus give us a window into the very creation of planets like our own.

On a fine summer’s day in the midst of the United Kingdom’s coronavirus lockdown in 2020, I found myself poring through abstracts from a recent space conference, and one paper in particular caught my eye. Two scientists had a new idea for the formation of chondrules, suggesting they may have been the result of low-flying space rocks skimming over magma oceans in the early solar system.

The paper grabbed my attention. I was hooked. Over the coming months, I spoke to a myriad of scientists across the field, quizzing them on a whole manner of questions regarding chondrules. I traveled to the Natural History Museum in London to see some in the flesh and marveled at these tiny beads of rock that had confounded so many and now too had me in their grip.

My editor at Scientific American, Lee Billings, did what he does best — turning my vague musings on a subject into a concrete article. By the year’s end we had our story, ready for the return of Hayabusa2, with my words made ever more eloquent and cohesive by Lee’s excellent and voracious editing.

I am hugely honored to have received the Walter Sullivan Award, and I am greatly indebted to the selection committee for choosing my feature. Sitting here, at my home in London, can sometimes be a solitary experience. I am eternally grateful that this feature, dreamed up in a sunny English garden amid a pandemic, has made waves far beyond.

— Jonathan O'Callaghan
Freelance Space Journalist
London, United Kingdom