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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In this enthralling cosmic journey through space and time, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder locates our home planet within its own 'family tree'. Our parent the Earth and its sibling planets in our solar system formed within the same gas cloud. Without our grandparent the Sun, we would not exist, and the Sun in turn relies on the Milky Way as its home. The Milky Way rests in a larger web of galaxies that traces its origins right back to tiny fluctuations in the very early universe. Following these cosmic connections, we discover the many ties that bind us to our universe. Based around readers' questions from the author's popular blog 'Astroquizzical', the book provides a quirky guide to how things work in the universe and why things are the way they are, from shooting stars on Earth, to black holes, to entire galaxies. For anyone interested in the 'big picture' of how the cosmos functions and how it is all connected, Jillian Scudder is the perfect guide.
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Seitenzahl: 317
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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CONTENTS
For the curious
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Keaton, for all his encouragement over the years.
Thanks to Mum, Dad, Matthew, and all my friends, who consistently got excited about what I was writing about.
And to all the readers of ‘Astroquizzical’ over the years, thank you for giving me your curiosity to satiate.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Black and white images in the text
1. A portion of the Apollo 15 lunar laser ranging retroreflector array.
2. A view of the full Moon as photographed from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
3. The Moon’s apparent size when it is closest to and farthest from Earth.
4. The crater Daedalus on the lunar far side as seen from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
5. Olympus Mons, largest of all known volcanoes in the solar system.
6. Self-portrait of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity.
7. A test version of the Mars landers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1975.
8. The solar system showing Pluto’s tilted orbit.
9. A view of Pluto’s icy mountains and ice plains.
10. A random walk with 2,500 steps.
11. The magnetic field of a bar magnet revealed by iron filings on paper.
12. A graph of a gravity well.
13. A measurement of gravitational waves from LIGO.
14. A graph showing the relative slowing of a clock in motion.
15. Edwin Hubble’s galaxy classification scheme.
Colorimages in the plate sections
1. The rich star fields of the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud.
2. A pillar of gas and dust located in the Carina Nebula.
3. The eight planets and the new solar system designations.
4. The protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star HL Tauri.
5. A comet-like object called P/2010 A2.
6. A still from the first color movie of Jupiter.
7. Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, located on Mars.
8. Hubble Space Telescope photographs of the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto.
9. Image of Pluto from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).
10. Solar system distances in perspective.
11. Four images of supernova remnants.
12. A Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
13. Messier 54, the first globular cluster found outside our galaxy.
14. Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant.
15. The remnant of Supernova 1987A seen in light of different wavelengths.
16. An artist’s rendition of a black hole with an orbiting companion star.
17. The large Whirlpool Galaxy and its smaller companion galaxy.
18. Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy Messier 101.
19. An artist’s conception of one of the most primitive supermassive black holes.
20. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
21. Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies merging.
22. The massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, including the ‘Space Invader galaxy’.
23. Giant elliptical galaxies showing gravitational lensing.
24. The Hubble Space Telescope eXtreme Deep Field.
LIST OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
Sights by day
No childhood pictures of the Earth?
Interplanetary transportation?
A hypothetical interplanetary delivery system
Jovian night skies
Life gets weird sometimes
Divide the Sun in half
What happens to time dilation at the speed of light?
TIMELINE
1https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/060915/index.html
2https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03138
3https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/multimedia/pia17449.html
4https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3180
5https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00461
6http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1998ApJ…498..106M
7https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0204331
8https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
PROLOGUE
You are living, in company with almost every other human, on the surface of the planet Earth, the only planet in the vast universe known to host intelligent life of any kind.
It’s often said by astrophysicists that every one of us should feel a strong connection to the stars. Without generations of stars that burned, exploded, or collided before our planet was formed, the carbon that our bodies are made of, the iron in our blood, and the gold and silver of our precious objects would simply not exist.
In a very tangible way, those stars made it possible for us to be here to look at them. Without them, we could not possibly have evolved on our watery world. But truly exploring how we are linked to them – and how they have led to our own lives on planet Earth – can be an arduous task, even for the curious-minded among us. While there are many ties between us and the stars, such information is often forgotten or hard to find.
This book explores the ties that link us not just to the stars, but to the universe as a whole – our cosmic family. Without a planet to call home, we would not exist. Without a star, our planet would not exist. Without a galaxy, our star would not exist. And without the filamentary nature of structure in the earliest universe, our galaxy would not exist. Each of them paved the way for another generation – building up the groundwork for our tree of life.
Welcome to your cosmic family tree. Let’s explore some of the stories that this family has to tell us.
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