The Stars of Heaven
Clifford A. Pickover
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0195148746
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Do a little armchair space travel, rub elbows with alien life forms, and stretch your mind to the furthest corners of our uncharted universe. With this astonishing guide book, The Stars of Heaven, you need not be an astronomer to explore the mysteries of stars and their profound meaning for human existence.
Stars have fascinated humankind since the dawn of history and have allowed us to transcend ordinary lives in our literature, art, and religions. In fact, humans have always looked to the stars as a source of inspiration and transcendence that lifts us beyond the boundaries of ordinary intuition. In the tradition of One Two Three... Infinity, Pickover tackles a range of topics from stellar evolution to the fundamental and awe-inspiring reasons why the universe permits life to flourish. Where did we come from? What is the universe's ultimate fate? Pickover alternates sections that explain the mysteries of the cosmos with sections that dramatize mind-expanding concepts through a fictional dialog between futuristic humans and their alien peers who embark on a journey beyond the reader's wildest imagination. This highly accessible and entertaining approach turns an intimidating subject into a scientific game open to all dreamers.
Told in Clifford Pickover's inimitable blend of fascinating state-of-the-art science and whimsical science fiction, and packed with numerous diagrams and illustrations, The Stars of Heaven unfolds a world of paradox and mystery, one that will intrigue anyone who has ever pondered the night sky with wonder.
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
The Astronomy Revolution: 400 Years of Exploring the Cosmos
The Greatest Comets in History: Broom Stars and Celestial Scimitars (Astronomers' Universe)
The Tunguska Mystery (Astronomers' Universe)
But the heavier atoms have more electrons and more complicated spectra." 30 The Stars of Heaven Bob pauses and looks at Miss Muxdroozol, "Let me list some facts. Scientists have observed around 74 different elements in stars. We're sure other natural elements exist in stars, but their quantities may be too low to make their lines visible. The majority of stars have similar compositions, with hydrogen making up about 90 percent of the number of atoms, followed by helium at 9.9 percent. All the.
149,604,970 kilometers. The resulting "Dyson Sphere" would be a strong source of infrared radiation, peaking at ten micrometers. Humans have already attempted to find such constructs by searching for their infrared signals.14 The Joy and Paschen of Starlight Figure 2.11 33 A Dyson sphere encompassing our Sun. Returning to Bob's plan to use the element technetium to turn our star into an interstellar beacon, U.S. astrophysicist Frank Drake (b. 1930) and Russian astronomer losif Samuilovich.
Bitter and the snow deep. Apparently Mr. Plex and Miss Muxdroozol don't seem to mind it either. Bob withdraws a book of matches from his pocket and hands it to Mr. Plex. "Mr. Plex, I want you to poke a hole in a piece of rind of the orange and stick a lighted match through it." "Yes Sir." A flame pokes through the orange skin. "The flame coming from the orange represents a solar flare that shoots from the Sun. Remember, I told you about them when we talked about twisted magnetic fields near the.
Lived the longest, billions of years, because they burn their hydrogen slowly. The red dwarfs have little mass and are the oldest and most numerous Main Sequence stars. Think of them as stingy misers that hoard all their riches, spending as little as possible to maintain their lives. On the other hand, the massive, big, hot, bright stars die fastest because they burn their hydrogen rapidly. Blue giant stars might only stay on the Main Sequence for a few million years before they start to die. A.
Individual's mastery of the game. "Bob," says Miss Muxdroozol, "how many black holes existed in our Galaxy back in the twenty-first century?" "No one was sure. Dr. Robert Wald once suggested that supernovas, the exploding, dying stars, occurred in our Galaxy at the rate of several per century. If a high fraction of them result in the formation of a black hole, there could have been be as many as one hundred million black holes in our Galaxy. Stephen Hawking believed that, in the long history of.