A Brief History of Black Holes: And why nearly everything you know about them is wrong

by Dr Becky Smethurst

Overview

In A Brief History of Black Holes, award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics.

Right now, you are orbiting a black hole.

The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy.

In this cosmic tale of discovery, Dr Becky Smethurst takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings.

A cosmic tale of discovery, Becky explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time. Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe, all hidden inside black holes.

'A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references' – BBC Sky At Night Magazine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781529086744
Publisher:	Pan Macmillan
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	101,190
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dr Becky Smethurst is an award-winning astrophysicist and science communicator at the University of Oxford, specializing in how galaxies co-evolve with their super massive black holes. She was recently awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Research Fellow ship for 2022. Her YouTube channel, ‘Dr Becky’, has over 500,000 subscribers who engage with her videos. A Brief History of Black Holes is her second book; her first, Space: 10 Things You Should Know was named one of Sky at Night magazine’s Top 20 books of 2019 and translated all around the world.

Table of Contents

Prologue Standing on the shoulders of giants 1

1 Why the stars shine 13

2 Live fast, die young 33

3 Mountains high enough to keep me from getting to you 57

4 Why black holes are 'black' 75

5 A teaspoon of neutrons helps the star collapse down! 89

6 Funny, it's spelled just like 'escape' 109

7 Why black holes are not 'black' 121

8 When 2 become 1 139

9 Your friendly neighbourhood black hole 161

10 Supermassive-size Me 181

11 Black holes don't suck 197

12 The old galaxy can't come to the phone right now. Why? Because she's dead 209

13 You can't stop tomorrow coming 225

14 Well, Judy, you did it. She's finally full 239

15 Everything that dies, someday comes back 249

Epilogue Here at the end of all things 259

Acknowledgements 265

Bibliography 268

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references” —BBC Sky At Night Magazine

“A fantastic read . . . there's certainly a lot to suck you in (unlike black holes, of course)” —Popular Mechanics

“A lot of astrophysics is packed into this neat little book” —Jim Al-Khalili on Space: 10 Things You Should Know

“Bite-sized, cutting edge science delivered with enormous enthusiasm” —Chris Lintott on Space: 10 Things You Should Know

From the Publisher