Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0300204418
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe.
Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA (Enlarged and Revised Edition)
lifelong with a desire to reconcile his religious and scientific views, conceived of these astronomical entities within the framework of a cosmotheological vision. Prior to distance measurements being made, it was conjectured that any sample of the universe is much like any other and therefore if all stars are assumed to be roughly as bright as the sun, the fainter ones appear so because they are simply farther away. Their distances could therefore be estimated by comparison with the brightness
implodes, as a result of which their outer layer is expelled as a supernova. This stellar detritus contains all the chemical elements that make us. All the calcium in our bones, for instance, was once synthesized inside the cores of stars and spat out violently during such supernovae explosions on their demise. The theory of the birth, evolution, and death of stars predicts that what is left behind after the implosion of a massive star is either a neutron star or a black hole. When the Cambridge
Rubin recounted that she had given birth to her first child a few weeks previously and that she nervously walked into the room, not knowing any of the assembled greats there. Her talk was rather grandly titled “Rotation of the Universe,” but that was a naïve, not arrogant, choice. The response was extremely hostile, and the general tenor of comments was that one simply could not do what she was attempting. But amid this skepticism, she vividly remembers one mild-mannered man with a strong German
and verify them, ideas dissipate and die. And crucially, the hot big bang theory still had doubters in the 1940s and 1950s. The CMBR is tied intricately to the big bang model and is in fact one of its key observational signatures. Since Alpher, Herman, and Gamow had not succeeded in explaining the origin of chemical elements in the context of the hot big bang model, this did not help persuade its detractors. Another hurdle for full acceptance of the hot big bang model concerned estimates of the
such methods have yielded success. The most popular search strategy, which revealed the hot Jupiters, is to measure radial velocity—the wobble of stars caused by the pull of their planet companions. Observation from ground-based telescopes then confirms the planet’s existence. This is how the method works: A star harboring a planet will respond to the planet’s gravity with motion around a tiny orbit. This leads to detectable small changes in the speed of the star that we can measure—manifested as
