Description: A richly illustrated and
highly readable account of what we know about the galaxy we live in, and how we
came to know it. Great for the astronomy
lover.
From the Publisher’s
Description: “ For thousands of
years our Milky Way—and what lies at its center, twenty-nine thousand
light-years from Earth—has been a source of wonder and inquiry. Joel Davis's
account of humankind's quest to understand our Galaxy is presented as a journey
in three parts. The first journey is one of the imagination, as Davis shows how
three generations of science-fiction writers—represented by Isaac Asimov, Larry
Niven, and Gregory Benford—have envisioned the heart of the Galaxy. Since good
science-fiction writing draws on the most current scientific evidence, the images
employed by these writers reveal much about our evolving beliefs about the
Galaxy in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Second is a journey in time, from the philosophers of ancient Sumer and
Greece to Copernicus in the sixteenth century, Galileo in the seventeenth
century, and English astronomer William Herschel in the nineteenth century, and
on to the twentieth century, from Einstein's theory of gravity through the
latest discoveries made by orbiting telescopes in the 1990s.
Finally, Davis charts a three-hundred-thousand-light-year
"physical" voyage from the outer reaches of the Galaxy to its very
core. Readers travel through the mysterious "dark matter" corona,
past clusters of millions of stars that orbit the Galaxy like vast stellar
cities, through clouds of molecular gas and dust that form the breeding grounds
of new stars, through the expanding shells of supernovae, and deep into the
central region of the Milky Way to encounter two enormous gas "smoke
rings" that were blown out of the Galactic core only a few tens of
millions of years ago. Still closer to the center, the traveler encounters gargantuan
streaming rivers of ionized gas called plasma. The final destination is the
monstrous black hole we have now learned is at the center of our Galaxy. “
About the Authors: Joel Davis is the author of several
books, including Mapping the Code.
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