Cosmic Odyssey
eBook - ePub

Cosmic Odyssey

How Intrepid Astronomers at Palomar Observatory Changed our View of the Universe

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Cosmic Odyssey

How Intrepid Astronomers at Palomar Observatory Changed our View of the Universe

About this book

Ever since 1936, pioneering scientists at Palomar Observatory in Southern California have pushed against the boundaries of the known universe, making a series of dazzling discoveries that changed our view of the cosmos: quasars, colliding galaxies, supermassive black holes, brown dwarfs, supernovae, dark matter, the never-ending expansion of the universe, and much more. In Cosmic Odyssey, astronomer Linda Schweizer tells the story of the men and women at Palomar and their efforts to decipher the vast energies and mysterious processes that govern our universe.

Palomar was the Apollo mission of its era. The first images from the 200-inch George Ellery Hale telescope, which was the world's largest when it was dedicated in 1948, generated as much excitement as images from the moon in 1969 and from the Hubble Space Telescope more recently. So far, Palomar's "Big Eye" and three other telescopes have yielded more than 75,000 telescope-nights of precious data. Schweizer takes readers behind the scenes of scientific discovery, mapping the often chaotic process of detours, dead ends, and serendipitous leaps of insight. Although her focus is on Palomar, she follows threads of discovery across the world to other teams and observatories. Based on more than one hundred interviews and enhanced by research in scientific journals, her account paints a fascinating picture of how discrete insights acquired over decades by researchers in a global community cascade, collide, and finally coalesce into the discoveries we come to accept as facts.

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Yes, you can access Cosmic Odyssey by Linda Schweizer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Physical Sciences & Astronomy & Astrophysics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Foreword by Dava Sobel
  5. Preface
  6. · 1 · The Promise
  7. · 2 · Plumbing the Depths of the Universe
  8. · 3 · Unraveling the Mysteries of Stellar Evolution
  9. · 4 · Milky Way Archaeology
  10. · 5 · Galactic Violence: Collisions and Mergers
  11. · 6 · Quasars: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
  12. · 7 · Piercing the Galactic “Smog”
  13. · 8 · Starbursts, Superwinds, and Supermassive Black Holes
  14. · 9 · Probing the Gaseous Universe
  15. · 10 · From Ghosts to Galaxies: The Emergence of Structure
  16. · 11 · Solar System Shuffle
  17. · 12 · Astronomical Exotica: New Frontiers
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Notes
  20. Index