Origins

The biggest questions in astronomy are those of how the planets, stars, galaxies, and the Universe were formed. ORIGINS describes how over the last decade, astronomers have discovered the probable answers to three of these fundamental questions.

Starting with the space missions that have uncovered the haphazard history of our own planetary system, this book travels into space and backwards in time, describing the discovery of other planetary systems and their connection to extraterrestrial life. The first moments in the life of a star are covered, along with the birth of galaxies, and the biggest question of all - the origin of the Universe itself.

ORIGINS also tells the human stories behind the discoveries: the astronomers who searched for Planet X but lost a planet, the cosmic archaeologists who deciphered the history of galaxies, and of boomerang, the telescope that came back and showed that space is flat.

Auteur

As an astronomer, Stephen Eales has travelled around the world, working in Cambridge, Honolulu, Toronto, and at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He is currently a professor of Astrophysics and Cosmology at Cardiff University, where he carries out research into the origin of galaxies.

Résumé

In the last decade, there has been a revolution in observational astronomy, which has meant that we are very close to answering three of the four big 'origin questions', of how the planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe itself were formed. As recently as 1995 we knew of only one planetary system: our own. Now we know of over a hundred, and this knowledge has helped to reveal how planetary systems form. In this same decade, new types of telescope have allowed us to penetrate through clouds of interstellar dust to see the first moments in the life of a star, and also to see directly (not infer) what galaxies looked like thirteen billion years ago, only a billion years after the Big Bang. Because of this new knowledge, we now have provisional answers to the second and third origin question. The final question is the one we can't yet answer, but even here there have been big steps towards an answer. Within the last four years, astronomers have discovered that the universe is geometrically flat and that its expansion is accelerating, fuelled by a mysterious dark energy. This revolution in our observational knowledge of the universe including the first precise measurements of its age and matter and energy content has been vital groundwork for new ideas about its origin, including the possibility that the universe originated in a larger `meta-universe'. Origin Questions describes, at an understandable and basically non-mathematical level, the origin questions and the recent steps that have been taken towards answering them.

Contenu

Planets.- Rocks.- The Day the Solar System Lost a Planet.- ET and the Exoplanets.- Stars.- Connections.- The Final Frontier.- Galaxies.- Silent Movie.- The History of Galaxies.- The Universe.- Watching the Big Bang on Television.- Plato's Ghost.