For pure theatrics and spectacle, Hollywood celebrities have nothing on the denizens of the heavens. Stars are born, live and die in fiery and fascinating ways - ways that we have only recently been able to study in greater detail, like so many swarming paparazzi, using the long-range lenses created by improved techniques and new, sharper observatories.
In this special edition from
Scientific American, we invite you to forget about everyday life to spend some time with the stars. In the pages that follow, you'll find the latest gossip on the glitterati, written by the astronomer shutterbugs themselves. -
The Editors
Hammer's Slammer Don Slade is coming home to the planet Tethys, to his son and the woman he loves. But the space between is dark and cold. And the stars he must pass shine their light on planets which beckon to the weary traveler, planets which hold hidden dangers.
This week we are discussing the speed of light. The medium most of you are listening by, radio waves, travel at the speed of light. And those of you closer to the radio transmitter will hear In Our Time fractionally before someone further away. Here's another curious fact to ponder: For anybody listening who is aged 50, the light that reaches us from some of the stars in the galaxy left those stars before you were born.
Ours is about 100,000 light years across, is shaped like a fried egg and we travel inside it at approximately 220 kilometres per second. The nearest one to us is much smaller and is nicknamed the Sagittarius Dwarf. But the one down the road, called Andromeda, is just as large as ours and, in 10 billion years, we'll probably crash into it.
Galaxies - the vast islands in space of staggering beauty and even more staggering dimension. But galaxies are not simply there to adorn the universe, they house much of its visible matter and maintain the stars in a constant cycle of creation and destruction.
