Weird Universe: Everything We Don't Know About Space (and Why It's Important) (Outer Universe, Astrophysics Gifts)

by Erika Hamden

Overview

Discover the Mysteries of Our Universe

Weird Universe is your gateway to the wonders of space. Have you ever looked up at the night sky and marveled at the mysteries hidden beyond the stars? This book takes that curiosity and turns it into an accessible, fun introduction to space, packed with all the weirdness we've discovered out there.

#1 New Release in Astronomy, Astrophysics & Space Science, and Cosmology

Unlock the wonders of space with a fresh and exciting perspective.

Erika Hamden, a renowned astrophysicist and educator, brings her passion for space to life in this engaging book. With years of experience studying the cosmos, Hamden specializes in making complex topics fun and easy to understand. Her expertise shines through as she leads readers on an exploration of the strangest and most awe-inspiring phenomena in space. Whether you're fascinated by the biggest black holes, curious about the history of NASA, or simply want to explore the strange and magnificent things we've found in outer space, this book is for you. No prior knowledge required—just a desire to understand more about the cosmos and its connection to life here on Earth..

See how space exploration shapes our everyday world. Space isn’t just an abstract concept—it plays a crucial role in shaping the technology we use every day. From NASA’s breakthroughs to innovations inspired by our exploration of the cosmos, Hamden shows how space discoveries influence our world. You’ll also gain insight into the process behind these findings, from the questions scientists ask to the groundbreaking answers they uncover. By the end of the book, you’ll understand not just what we know about the universe, but how we’ve come to know it.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A clear, engaging look at black holes, galaxies, and the history of NASA, explained in simple terms.
• Fascinating insights into how scientists make new discoveries about space, with a focus on how it all connects to us here on Earth.
• Fun and accessible content perfect for all ages, including those learning space for kids and adults who want to dive deeper into the world of astronomy.

If you liked Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, The Illustrated Brief History of Time, or Not Necessarily Rocket Science, you’ll love Weird Universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684817283
Publisher:	Mango Media
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	191
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dr. Erika Hamden is an American astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet (UV) detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV/VIS) instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium (CGM). She is a 2019 TED fellow. She lives in Phoenix, AZ.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 2: Black Holes: A mathematical novelty that turned out to be real. Also, not a vacuum cleaner.

In popular culture, black holes are insatiable monsters, lurking hidden in space, waiting to eat everything and everything wandering by. Beware!! But in reality, black holes are, while technical insatiable, incredibly well behaved and at least from an external perspective, completely predictable. Of course, this can all be true AND at the same time, black holes are incredibly weird. Our understanding of the nature of space-time within them breaks down completely at the very center of the black hole, and any indestructible observers falling into the black hole experience the universe in such a strange way that space and time appear to have swapped. Black holes are the universe at its most bizarre and spectacular.

The concept of a black hole, defined as something with enough gravity that nothing can escape from it, not even light, has been around for a surprisingly long amount of time. In the late 1700s, English astronomer John Michell theorized a star so big that light couldn’t escape from the pull of gravity. In this conception, the density of such a “dark star” is the same as that of the sun, but the star would have to be 500 times larger in diameter. The escape velocity from its surface would be faster than the speed of light. Light would start moving away from the star, and eventually slow down and get pulled back to the star. This theory was briefly popular and then fell out of favor as our understanding of the nature of light itself evolved (we don’t actually talk much about it in this volume, but light is pretty high up on the list of weird things in the Universe. The behavior John Michele described is impossible with our current understanding of light). The “dark star” concept slept for 130 years, waiting for a better understanding of gravity to reemerge.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, published in 1915, gives us a framework for understanding the structure of the universe. We talked about this back in Chapter 1- the very fabric of the universe is space-time, which can be curved, distorted, and rippled like a pond. The theory of relativity provides so-called “field equations”, which are a way to calculate the curvature of space-time based on the locations of mass in that spacetime. It was originally thought that there would be no clean solutions to the field equations, just laborious calculations to come up with complex tables of spacetime curvature. But just a few months after the publication of relativity, a German physicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated a formula to predict the spacetime curvature around a single, spherical mass with no rotation, no charge, no extra bits of any kind. This “solution” to the field equations provides a useful approximation for large, slowly rotating objects like the Sun and the Earth (which each lightly distort spacetime). But taken to an extreme, it predicts that for a massive enough and simultaneously small enough object, a singularity will form, where the terms of the field equations become infinite. The implications of a singularity in space were not really explored at the time. Instead, the “Schwarzschild solution” was viewed as a mathematical curiosity, which was certainly studied and evolved over may years (adjustments to the coordinate system used made the equations simpler and more realistic), but it was never treated as if it could represent something which actually existed.

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered neutron stars (as we learned in an earlier chapter!) and the field of astronomy collectively realized that there was a whole collection of “gravitationally collapsed” objects that existed. This included a re-examination of the concept of singularities, and re-ignited the possibility that the singularities predicted by general relativity were real. The origin of the term black hole is not clear, it seems to have been in use by 1964, but didn’t become popular in John Wheeler started using it after one of his talks on “gravitationally completely collapsed objects”. A listener said it might be faster and easier to refer to them as “black holes” and the name has been in use ever since. The first astrophysical black hole ever discovered is called “Cygnus X-1”, which was first observed in 1965 by the bright X-rays that it emits. It took nearly a decade to identify Cygnus X-1 as a black hole. It is part of a binary system, with a blue supergiant companion. By using the motion of the companion star, the mass of the black hole can be measure- it’s about 21 times the mass of the sun. This mass, which must be within a very small area, can only be a black hole. The X-rays are emitted by the disk of material swirling around the black hole itself.

Since Cygnus X-1, we’ve discovered many black holes, in the nearby and distant universe. Most weirdly, it seems that every galaxy has a very, very, very massive black hole at its center. Black Holes appear to range in size from just a few times the mass of the sun to tens of billions of times the mass of the sun.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Spacetime, the Counterintuitive Fabric of the Universe

Chapter 2: Black Holes: A Mathematical Novelty That Turned Out to Be Real. Also, Not a Vacuum Cleaner

Chapter 3: Space Is Actually Quite Large (Larger Than You Think)

Chapter 4: Stars, the Universe’s Response to Gravity

Chapter 5: The Biggest, Fastest, Smallest, Weirdest Stars

Chapter 6: Nuclear Spaghetti and the Deaths of Stars

Chapter 7: We Used to Think This Was All There Was

Chapter 8: Up Until 1960, We Thought Venus Was a Tropical Paradise

Chapter 9: Planets Are Surprisingly Common

Chapter 10: Most Solar Systems Are Nothing like Our Own

Chapter 11: Every Planet We Reach Is Dead

Chapter 12: Quasars and Galaxies at the Beginning of Time

Chapter 13: Speaking of the Beginning of Time…

Chapter 14: The (Tragic and Yet Possibly Quite Boring) Heat Death of the Universe

Chapter 15: The Dark Sector: A Large but Incomplete List of the Things We Don’t Know

Chapter 16: We Are the Universe Observing Itself

Conclusion: The Earth Isn’t at the Center of Anything

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Dr. Hamden's fresh, funny take on our wildly strange universe will leave you laughing...while also expanding your understanding of our place in the cosmos.”

—Michelle Nelson, executive producer of Mission Unstoppable on CBS

“Weird Universe is a brilliant, raucous delight. With her gift for storytelling, Dr. Hamden reveals the quirks and wonders of our universe in a way that’s simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and deeply informative. This book is a must-read for anyone, science lover or not, who wants to explore just how strange space is. Prepare to laugh, learn, and look at the stars a little differently.”

—Dr. Sarafina El-Badry Nance, Author of Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark

From the Publisher