Author: Marcia Bartusiak
Publisher: Yale University Press 2018
This is very easy read and is most suitable for a teenager who is interested in astronomy. I recommend this book for that purpose. The following are few (adjusted) excerpts from various stories.
“Based on his calculations, which took into account the additional tugs by Jupiter in the comet’s journey through the solar system, Halley made a prediction. “I dare venture to foretell,” he announced in his 1705 paper, “that it will return again in the year 1758.” The comet appeared on schedule, just as Halley foretold. The public was bedazzled, and the remaining critics of Newton’s controversial law of gravity were instantly silenced.
On the evening of the new year’s day in 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi noted a shifting star in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. By February he was unable to continue his observations because the object was lost in the glare of the sun, but he communicated his find to other astronomers. The noted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was able to calculate its orbit from the limited data. Astronomers relocated the Piazzi’s object (Ceres) on December 31, near the very spot in the constellation Virgo, the Virgin, that Gauss has computed.
German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel announced in 1844 that the stars Sirius and Procyon were not traveling smoothly. Each star displayed a slight but distinct wobble. With great cleverness, Bessel deduced that each star’s quivering walk meant it was being pulled on by a dark, invisible companion circling it.
Jocelyn Bell working on the newly constructed radio telescope discovered a pulsar that was emitting methodical pulses in every 1.3 seconds. The unprecedented precision caused Hewish (Bell’s thesis advisor) and his group to briefly label the source LGM, for “Little Green Men”. But within a few months, Bell uncovered three more pulsars in different regions of the sky. It was highly unlikely, she said that there were “lots of little green men on opposite sides of the universe” using the same frequency to get Earth’s attention. The news was finally released in February 1968, and upon discovering a pretty, young woman was involved, the press went wild. “One of [the photographers] even had me running down the bank waving my arms in the air—Look happy dear, you’ve just made a discovery!”.
Because of the fear that the Japanese might attack the west cost, the Los Angeles area was blacked out nightly during the conflict. German-born Walter Baade was designated an “enemy alien” and restricted to the Pasadena area. That means he has almost unlimited time on the 100-inch Mount Wilson Observatory, allowing him to get the best look ever at the Andromeda galaxy. Bade came to realize that highly luminous blue and blue-white supergiant stars, along with bright gaseous nebulae, tended to reside only in Andromeda’s spiral arms. The mechanism behind galaxy’s spiraling structure wasn’t identified until the 1960s, but nonetheless Baade has still found perfect objects to delineate a spiral galaxy’s arms.
The Milky Way has a new address. For more than a six decades it’s been known that our galactic home is perched at the edge of a long and vast collection of galaxies called the Virgo Supercluster. But a team of astronomers led by R. Brent Tully of University of Hawaii at Manoa announced that we belong to an even larger assembly in this sector of the universe. The team dubbed this gargantuan structure “Laniakea”, which means “immense heaven” in Hawaiian. Home to some 100,000 galaxies, Laniakea stretches more than 500 million light years across.
Time turns out to be the biggest obstacle to getting the general relativity and quantum mechanics combined into a single theory. This is the topic of the last short story and it is an unfinished story. I will provide a link to a recent article as a comment. (This article may not be suitable for a teenager though.)
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