|
A captivating journey through the modern astronomy of the Milky
Way, revealing the larger clues that an understanding of the Galaxy can offer
into the origins of the universe. The Milky Way Galaxy
-- home of the Earth, Sun, and countless other stars -- has long been an object
of human fascination. To Australia's aborigines the Milky Way was the smoke from
a heavenly campfire, while Native American warriors considered it the road to
their final resting place. More recently, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
astronomers brought their telescopes to bear on the Milky Way, hoping to discern
its shape and map the stars that filled its boundaries. Yet
as astronomer Ken Croswell points out in The Alchemy of the Heavens, it's
been within the last forty years that scientists have made the most stunning discoveries
about the galaxy we call home. With a remarkable ability to make difficult concepts
clear, Croswell skillfully leads the reader through a detailed survey of current
thinking on the Milky Way. He reveals, for example, that the Milky Way probably
formed as many earlier galaxies smashed together; that many of the elements of
the Earth, including the iron and oxygen that course through our bodies, were
cast into space by exploding supernovae; that in all likelihood there is a massive
black hole at the center of the Galaxy, with a million times more mass than the
Sun, and that the Milky Way's oldest stars preserve the elements created in the
big bang, thereby serving as "fossils" of the universe's earliest days.
Along the way Croswell also introduces us to the brilliant astronomers
who made some of these discoveries, and recounts the fierce debates that have
driven forward our understanding of the Galaxy. Finally, and perhaps most important,
we see how knowledge about the Galaxy in particular can give us tremendous insight
into the origins of the universe as a whole.
Ken Croswell has a Ph.D.
in astronomy from Harvard and has written for a number of popular magazines, including
Astronomy, New Scientist, and Sky and Telescope. He also
writes for the "Star Date" radio program, which is aired on two hundred
radio stations nationwide. He resides in Berkeley, California. |
