The extragalactic universe, the immense world of a billion galaxies lying beyond out own, is the subject of this book. Our Sun is but a tiny star among a hundred billion other in our Galaxy, the Milky Way, which appears as a luminous veil trailing across the clear night sky. Beyond the Milky Way we will soar into space amid galaxies, clusters of galaxies, radio galaxies and quasars of enormous energy, out to the cosmological horizon which arrests our flight like an intangible barrier. Why do galaxies seem to fly from us? Is space so strongly curved that by going straight ahead we come up behind ourselves? Did it all begin with an enormous explosion, the famous Big Bang, which decided our fate in the first quarter of an hour? These are the questions which this rigourous and enthusiastic scientist tries to answer with complete honesty and non-technical clarity.
The immensity of the cosmos, the richness of the Universe, the limits of space and time: these are the themes of Cosmic Odyssey, which takes the reader on imaginary journeys through the past, present and future of our universe.
This book collects together a selection of the best paperspresented at the Third International Bioastronomy Symposiumheld in 1990. The subject is bioastronomy, the search forlife in the universe, and
If extraterrestrial intelligence exists, then positive detection of it would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time. This book explains our position and techniques, from both the technologic
By what criteria should we judge whether we are alone in the cosmos, and how should we set about detecting extraterrestrials? Jean Heidmann answers these questions in this engaging discussion of extra
