Turn Right At Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos
Mitchell Begelman
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: B01K2OIVXG
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
eISBN-13: 978-0-465-01216-9
Turn Right at Orion is the account of an epic astronomical journey, discovered sixty million years in Earth's future-the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative style that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the center of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars and of planets, and almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole-and all the while Begelman explains in clear and vibrant prose how things work the way they do in the cosmos. Turn Right at Orion is a serious science book that reads like fiction.
The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence
Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky: A History of Famous Incidents, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups
Messier Astrophotography Reference
Without heroic efforts at maintenance. Any deviations from a spherical shape would be quickly washed away. If a star were spinning rapidly enough, then I could understand how it might bulge about the equator, the result of centrifugal force flattening it slightly. Jupiter, Which spins so fast that its day is only 10 hours, presents a noticeably oblate profile as viewed from Earth through any small telescope. Yet even that whirling dervish of a planet is pretty close to spherical. But not this.
And the other planets I had visited. According to the theory, carbon and oxygen would be joined by some other trace elements. But would they be disseminated into space? Could Betelgeuse’s wind be the medium of their dispersal? My measurement of the wind’s composition, as a fresh gust blew past, seemed to bear out the idea. The wind was cool and dense enough for molecules to form, even for solid grains to condense, and condense they did. There were the common terrestrial gases carbon monoxide and.
Would see the sky light up just before the second anniversary of the explosion. Witnessing the first assault of the supernova on its surroundings would provide a kind of closure to this leg of my journey The initial flash of the supernova’s light had been intense with ultraviolet rays, and if the dense gas expelled by the red supergiant surrounded me on all sides, then the whole sky should light up in the exquisite green of twice-ionized oxygen. The contrast with the deep reds of the expanding.
As bright as a million or a billion Cygnus X-1’s—and the black hole could have grown to its present size in merely a few hundred million years. I could not be sure that this black hole—or the Milky Way’s black hole, for that matter—was homegrown. My visit to Virgo, following on the heels of my stay in the doomed Magellanic Clouds, had shown me that whole galaxies do collide and merge from time to time. If the cluster atmosphere, which, after all, contained much more matter than all of Virgo’s.
Galaxies with hot gas; velocities of galaxies; See also M49; M87 W50 (SS 433 cavity) Water: in molecular clouds; planet formation and Waves and quantum mechanics White dwarfs; definition; degeneracy and; red supergiant at Dumbbell Nebula’s center as; supernovae and Winds (stellar): on Betelgeuse; from blue supergiants; from Crab II neutron star; on red supergiant at Dumbbell Nebula’s center; from red supergiants; Ring Nebula and; SS 433 and; from stars in the Trapezium Cluster; on the.