Stardust: The Cosmic Recycling Of Stars Planets And People (Penguin Press Science)
John Gribbin
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0140283781
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'Superb ...Gribbin has done it again ...the story of how the matter that makes up our bodies travelled from the stars ...a wonderful account' - "Sunday Times", Books of the Year. Every one of us is made of stardust, John Gribbin explains in this dazzling book. Everything we see, touch, breathe and smell, nearly every molecule in our bodies, is the by-product of stars as they live and die in spectacular explosions, scattering material across the universe which is recycled to become part of us. It is only by understanding how stars are made and how they die that we can every understand how we came into being. Taking us on an enthralling journey, John Gribbin shows us the scientific breakthroughs in the quest for our origins. With the raw materials for creating life all around us, he concludes, it is impossible to believe we are alone in the universe. 'An incredible story ...gives a sense of the almost unbelievable coincidence of physical laws and circumstances that resulted in your being able to read these words today' - "Literary Review". 'Gribbin skilfully and engagingly traces the historical sequence ...rather like Sherlock Holmes reading clues' - "New Scientist".
The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is
Observing and Measuring Visual Double Stars
Astronomically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Astronomy and Physics
Stars as tiny lights attached to a rigid sphere surrounding the Earth was finally knocked away. Edmond Halley, of comet fame, was appointed by the Royal Society to collate a new star catalogue, using data from observations which had been carried out by the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed.1 In the course of this work, Halley compared data from a catalogue compiled by Hipparchus in the second century BC with the new data. Of course, many more stars had been catalogued by Flamsteed, but his.
Telescope known as a Schmidt camera became operational on Mount Palomar in California, where the new 200-inch (5m) telescope was being built, that Zwicky regularly began to find supernovae going off in galaxies beyond the Milky Way, at a rate of a couple a year. This was the start of the scientific study of supernovae. With the aid of the Schmidt camera, which has a wide field of view, Zwicky could monitor many galaxies, and as soon as he spotted a supernova he could alert colleagues at nearby.
The decline of the light curve, were ‘the most important and exciting ones [he had ever seen] concerned with the origin of the elements, confirming that the theoretical model is broadly correct’. We know where the elements came from, and why they exist in the Universe in the proportions they do. But how do they get from the supernovae into stars like the Sun, planets like the Earth and people like us? The clue lies in the way that SN 1987A faded abruptly at the beginning of 1990, as it became.
Own Universe may have been born in this way out of a black hole in another universe. This certainly shifts our view of the Universe, for it means that the Universe is not unique. Instead, it is one of a population of universes, Figure A.2 If one baby universe can form from a black hole, then there could be an enormous number of universes (in principle, infinitely many) connected by a complex web of wormholes. This is the basis for speculations that universes themselves may evolve, in the.
Emphasizing that this is not some wacky idea from a mad professor. But that every prediction of the theory, including the relationship between mass and energy, has been tested in experiments very many times since 1905, and the theory has proved to be a good description of the way the world works, to many decimal places. You may not like it, but if you cannot accept it you are in the same position as someone who believes the Earth to be flat. 1 In the scientific paper based on her PhD thesis,.