DIAMONDS EVERYWHERE EB

Tom Kerss

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9780008658434
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Photography

Answers to the mysteries of the cosmos for inquiring minds.

Explore the entire cosmos in 101 fascinating topics – from mind-blowing numbers, astonishing sights, to strange-but-true discoveries and everything in between.

Feed your cosmic curiosity with this comprehensive guide to the Universe, featuring 101 out-of-this-world astronomical facts, discoveries and innovations. From gravitational curls to strange new worlds; the night sky to the end of time – you're sure to find something you never knew before in this mind-expanding book, and with stunning images from the latest and greatest observatories, every turn of the page offers a visual treat. It's the perfect gift for earthlings who love to learn.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• A note from the author
• Spaceship Earth: a habitable haven of astronomical challenges
• The Sun is the Alpha and the Omega
• Revealing the Moon’s true colours
• The constellations are losing their shape
• Venus: a volcanologist’s dream
• Counting the stars in the Milky Way
• On Mars, sunsets are blue
• The North Star is a temporary title
• We live in the galactic suburbs
• Where in space did the Big Bang occur?
• The awesome scale of cometary tails
• Some stars are so cool, you could touch them without scolding your hand
• Pluto is stranger than anyone imagined
• Infant stars hide in cosmic cocoons
• The haunting beauty of galaxy mergers
• The asteroid belt: not how you imagine it
• Precious metals are forged when dead stars collide
• Moonquakes rock our celestial companion
• The days are getting longer
• Your hair collects dust from comets
• The Tarantula: a fitting name for a monster nebula
• The lingering mystery of ‘antimatter’ stars
• The nearest star system to the Sun hosts a terrestrial exoplanet
• An asteroid that has its own rings
• Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is going to hit us
• Why build a telescope at the South Pole?
• Exomoons exist! Why shouldn’t they?
• Is empty space really empty?
• Wow! What was that?
• The Hubble Space Telescope: a powerful pioneer
• This is STEVE
• Strange cryovolcanoes erupt across the Solar System
• The coldest place in the Universe is closer than you think
• Asteroids can have their own moons
• Gravitational dead zones are perfect for space observatories
• The Earth casts a long shadow
• A bizarre hexagonal polar vortex surrounds Saturn’s north pole
• Planetary nebulae: snowflakes in space
• Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking
• Shooting stars blaze with colour
• Redshift and blueshift: how velocity changes your colour
• Understanding the hydrogen line
• What happened during the Dark Ages?
• Uranus and Neptune may have switched places
• This is a supernova, nearly one thousand years later
• Barnard’s star is racing across the sky
• Scientists put a robot on the surface of a comet
• The mystery of the Cererian faculae
• The not-so-rare Earth hypothesis
• The EHT: one telescope to rule them all
• ‘Oumuamua: the first known interstellar object
• We may live in a multiverse
• The incredible power of adaptive optics
• The Milky Way has a turbulent heart
• Titan is a moon but it looks more like a planet
• Everyone wants to see Betelgeuse explode
• Saturn’s rings are incredibly thin
• Ordinary matter is surprisingly rare
• This is what baby solar systems look like
• Quasars: a decades-long mystery solved
• Mars has the strangest auroras in the Solar System
• Welcome to your extended neighbourhood
• Pushing the limits: astrophysical jets that reach relativistic speeds
• Brilliant Sirius has a tiny, hidden companion
• Gorgeous green is a rare treat
• These ‘holes in space’ are nothing to fear
• How long is a galactic year?
• Demystifying the colours of the stars
• The night sky is a time machine
• Has any spacecraft departed the Solar System?
• It took Hubble nearly a million seconds to capture this image
• Mars was once a wetter world
• Omega Centauri: king of the globular clusters
• For space, the speed of light is just a suggestion
• The Milky Way is a queen bee
• Explosions? Aliens? Superconducting strings? What’s causing these strange signals from space?
• A ‘hypergiant’ star that makes the Sun seem tiny
• Diamonds everywhere: the precious stone littering the Galaxy
• IC 1101: a monster galaxy that dwarfs the Milky Way
• Black holes: creators of galaxies and destroyers of worlds
• Can a day be longer than a year?
• The neutron star that spins at 24 per cent of the speed of light
• Eta Carinae: life on the edge
• Gigantic lenses made of dark matter distort our view of the Universe
• Rogue planets are lurking in the darkness between the stars
• Some stars love company, most don’t
• A collision of two galaxy clusters made dark matter impossible to ignore
• Colliding black holes and neutron stars release ripples in space-time that change the shape of the Earth
• Some planets have more than one sun
• The young Moon created ‘supertides’ unlike anything seen today
• The Universe has its own TV channel
• Jupiter has the wildest auroras in the Solar System
• Why is Mercury’s core so big?
• Stellar creation on a gargantuan scale
• Hellish ‘Hot Jupiters’ make Venus look pleasant
• What do X-ray telescopes see?
• Gaia: mapping the stars like never before
• These are the Solar System’s water worlds
• Need more time? Use a gravitational field
• This is what winning the exoplanet lottery looks like
• The James Webb Space Telescope: a next-generation infrared powerhouse
• Glossary of terms
• Acknowledgements
• Author Biography
• About the Publisher