The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries

...And Other Amazing Cosmic Facts

Jillian Scudder

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785789274
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Astronomy & Astrophysics

An offbeat guided tour of the Universe, focusing on weird and wonderful facts.

Astrophysicist Dr Jillian Scudder knows more than most of us what a surreal place the Universe can be. In this light-hearted book she delves into some of the more arcane facts that her work has revealed, and tells us how we have actually managed to discover these amazing truths.

Did you know: the galaxy is flatter than a sheet of paper; supermassive black holes can sing a super-low B flat; it rains iron on a brown dwarf, and diamonds on Neptune; you could grow turnips on Mars if its soil weren't full of rocket fuel; the Universe is beige, on average; Jupiter's magnetic field will short-circuit your spacecraft - and, of course, the Milky Way smells of rum and raspberries.

Table of contents

• Praise for Astroquizzical
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• The electromagnetic spectrum
• The Universe is the dimmest it’s been in billions of years
• The Universe is beige, on average
• The galaxy is flatter than a credit card
• Galaxy collisions don’t actually cause any stars to collide
• The galactic center tastes of raspberries and smells of rum
• The centers of galaxies can blow galaxy-sized bubbles
• A distant black hole is surrounded by water
• Some galaxies look like jellyfish
• The whole sky glows in neutral hydrogen
• Some of the stars in the galaxy are just passing through
• Supermassive black holes can sing a super-low B flat
• Some black holes could be necromancers
• Neutron stars colliding gave us gold and platinum on Earth
• Some objects spin so fast they nearly self-destruct
• It rains iron on some brown dwarfs
• We saw a chunk of rock or ice from outside the solar system
• Io has lakes of lava
• It rains diamonds on Neptune
• An exoplanet we thought was made of diamond might be lava instead
• There’s a pitch-black exoplanet
• The Moon smells of gunpowder
• You could grow turnips on Mars soil if it weren’t full of rocket fuel
• The Moon once had lava lakes and fire fountains
• Saturn’s less dense than water
• Venus’s surface is new
• The Moon’s wet
• Some of Titan’s lakes might be the flooded remains of explosions
• Pluto’s surface is young, somehow
• Some asteroids are just piles of rubble in space
• Jupiter’s magnetic field will short-circuit your spacecraft, but Venus will just melt it
• Europa might glow in the dark
• Saturn’s rings are falling apart
• Ceres once had volcanoes that erupted with salt water
• Triton orbits backwards and is doomed
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright