Parting the Cosmic Veil

Capa
Springer Science & Business Media, 31/12/2007 - 229 páginas

Parting the Cosmic Veil describes our gradual awareness of a vast, previously concealed Universe. It is a story of expanding horizons and the discovery of invisible worlds, made possible with new technology and novel telescopes that have broadened our range of perception and sharpened our vision.

Spacecraft have carried men to the Moon, and traveled throughout the Solar System, obtaining close-up views that have transformed the moons and planets from moving points of light to fascinating, diverse worlds. Modern technology has also enabled the detection of giant planets around other stars, taking us one step closer to the possible detection of life outside the Earth.

Astronomers have used telescopes, operating at the visible wavelengths that we see with our eye, to reveal the true extent of the Milky Way and discover billions of remote galaxies that are rushing away from us in an expanding Universe. Each of these galaxies contains billions of stars wheeling around their massive central hub.

Radio waves and X-rays, which lie beyond the range of visual perception, are used to detect a violent Universe, from exploding stars to gamma ray bursts and the Big Bang itself, with the associated discoveries of pulsars, black holes and quasars. Radio astronomers have also shown that the dark spaces between the stars contain vast tracts of cold hydrogen atoms and a host of molecules.

Dark invisible matter has been discovered residing outside the shining stars and galaxies, outweighing them all. And a mysterious dark energy has also been found, which fills the nooks and crannies of seemingly empty space.

The Cosmos is evolving, participating in ongoing processes of creation, destruction, and re-birth. But even though we are pushing the boundaries of knowledge closer to an understanding of the origins and destinies, of either the Universe or Life, the ultimate answers to these grand questions still lie hidden behind the Cosmic Veil.

This voyage of discovery is presented within universal themes, such as invisibility, motion, content, form, impermanence, violence and emptiness, beginnings and ends. These are topics that concern us all, helping us take the Universe personally, so each chapter begins with the human aspect of some of these themes.

Parting the Cosmic Veil is additionally broadened by including the perceptions of artists, poets and writers, each example chosen for the insight it offers, as well as with line drawings that forcefully compact a scientific insight.

Professor Lang is known for his famous, widely used reference books Astrophysical Formulae I, II, published in their third edition in 1995 by Springer-Verlag. He is also a writer of prize-winning science books that have a broad readership, including amateurs, experts and the educated layperson. Some of these popular books, which include Sun, Earth and Sky, Wanderers in Space, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Sun and the Cambridge Guide to the Solar System, have been translated into seven languages.

No interior do livro

Índice

1 Starry night Arles
4
6 Galaxy bubbles and walls
10
8 Christmas island
19
BRAVE NEW WORLDS
29
1 An enormous Moon
34
5 Maat Mons
40
11 Formation of the Solar System
47
15 Hair followed by two planets
54
14 Discovery diagram of the expanding Universe
84
19 Great walls of galaxies
97
THE EXPLOSIVE UNIVERSE
99
5 Light echoes from SN 1987A
113
9 Xray pulsar
126
15 Gammaray burst
139
THE FULLNESS OF SPACE
151
EPILOGUE ORIGINS AND DESTINIES 189
188

MOTION CONTENT AND FORM
57
1 Radiating lines
58
5 The Milky Way
71
QUOTATION REFERENCES
209
Direitos de autor

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Palavras e frases frequentes

Passagens conhecidas

Página 3 - A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast. And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again: The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain. And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
Página 68 - THE night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.
Página 34 - I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
Página 33 - Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific— and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Página 60 - The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside...
Página 18 - In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
Página 82 - THE POSSIBILITIES OF LARGE TELESCOPES BY GEORGE ELLERY HALE Honorary Director of the Mount Wilson Observatory EUE buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times. Princes and potentates, political or industrial, equally with men of science, have felt the lure of the uncharted seas of space, and through their provision of instrumental means the sphere of exploration has rapidly widened.

Acerca do autor (2007)

Professor Lang has written several books about the Sun, as well as widely used reference works in astronomy and astrophysics. He has carried out radio observations of the active Sun with the Very Large Array in support of the SOHO spacecraft, teaches an extremely popular introductory course about the Sun to Tufts University students with non-scientific majors, and has served for two years as Visiting Senior Scientist in Solar Physics at NASA Headquarters.

Informação bibliográfica