Contents:
Part I: Planets - Rocks , The Day the Solar System Lost a Planet , ET and the Exoplanets
Part II: Stars - Connections, The Final Frontier
Part III: Galaxies - Silent Movie , The History of Galaxies
Part IV: The Universe - Watching the Big Bang on Television , Plato’s Ghost
Summary:
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.
Official site of the book: http://www.originquestions.com/
