The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe
Timothy Ferris
Language: English
Pages: 287
ISBN: 0688031765
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hailed by the critics as a classic modern science writing, The Red Limit was awarded the American Institute of Physics Prize. 4 cassettes.
Spacecraft for Astronomy (Frontiers in Space)
The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
considered as ‘outside’ our galaxy.” Years later, when he was being acclaimed as the man who unveiled the galaxies and opened our eyes to the universe, Hubble still stuck to his old terminology. “The term nebulae offers the values of tradition,” he wrote, “the term galaxies, the glamour of romance.” To resolve one of the spirals into stars would establish without much doubt that it was a galaxy. But this task appeared to be too much for the 60-inch telescope. A few of Ritchey’s superb photographs
lower—longer wavelength—if it is speeding away. The spectrum is said to be “Doppler shifted” by velocity. Spectral lines could be measured with considerable accuracy, so this meant the velocities of remote, bright objects, namely stars, could be too. James Keeler at Lick Observatory soon found a Doppler shift, in the spectrum of the bright star Arcturus—a blue shift, indicating that Arcturus and the sun were growing closer in the course of their common sweep in our galaxy. Thereafter Doppler
at large lookback times held enormous potential interest to astrono- 106 / THE RED LIMIT mers. It offered a way to study cosmic history directly. If the universe once expanded much faster than it does today, that fact ought to be ascertainable by studying the red shift of galaxies so far away that we view them as they were in an earlier cosmic epoch. If galaxies themselves looked different in their youth, that too should be observable. As Hubble optimistically forecast, “The combined efforts
his life, he had observed by proxy, dispatching graduate students up the mountain with assignments precise and forceful as battle orders. The brightest of these students, in Hubble’s view, was Allan Sandage. A Midwesterner like Hubble and Shapley, Sandage came from Iowa City, graduated in physics from the University of Illinois and arrived at Caltech in 1948, when the graduate astronomy department there opened its doors. Knowing those doors would lead to the Mt. Wilson and Palomar telescopes, the
way known for quasars to show such spectra was for them to lie at great distances in an expanding universe. Schmidt drove home and told his wife, in his Dutch-accented English, “Something horrible happened at the office today.” He saw her shocked expression and realized he had chosen the wrong word. “I mean, something wonderful,” he said. “Your hope, when you start a career in science, is that you will discover something,” Schmidt said ten years later. “Of course, there are many kinds of
