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Cosmic Odyssey: How Intrepid Astronomers at Palomar Observatory Changed our View of the Universe
312Overview
Ever since 1936, pioneering scientists at Palomar Observatory in Southern California have pushed against the boundaries of the known universe, making a series of dazzling discoveries that changed our view of the cosmos: quasars, colliding galaxies, supermassive black holes, brown dwarfs, supernovae, dark matter, the never-ending expansion of the universe, and much more. In Cosmic Odyssey, astronomer Linda Schweizer tells the story of the men and women at Palomar and their efforts to decipher the vast energies and mysterious processes that govern our universe.
Palomar was the Apollo mission of its era. The first images from the 200-inch George Ellery Hale telescope, commissioned in 1948 as the world's largest, generated as much excitement as images from the moon in 1969 and from the Hubble Space Telescope more recently. So far, Palomar's “Big Eye” and three other telescopes have yielded more than 75,000 telescope-nights of precious data. Schweizer takes readers behind the scenes of scientific discovery, mapping the often chaotic process of detours, dead ends, and serendipitous leaps of insight. Although her focus is on Palomar, she follows threads of discovery across the world to other teams and observatories. Based on more than one hundred interviews and enhanced by research in scientific journals, her account paints a fascinating picture of how discrete insights acquired over decades by researchers in a global community cascade, collide, and finally coalesce into the discoveries we come to accept as facts.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262044295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2020 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 185,396 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Foreword Dava Sobel ix
Preface xi
1 The Promise 1
Architect of an Astrophysical Revolution
The "Big Eye"
Spherical Genius
The Palomar Sky Survey
Widening Horizons
2 Plumbing the Depths of The Universe 19
Blinking Beacons
The Swope Slope
A Glimmer of Things to Come
The Universe Throws Down the Gauntlet
The Whistleblower
"Stupendous Eruptive Phenomena"
Cinderella in the Subbasement
3 Unraveling the Mysteries of Stellar Evolution 45
The Breakthrough
Stellar Radioactivity, Storms, Flares, and Winds
Nucleosynthesis Enshrined
Californium and the Bikini Test
Heavy Metal
Necropolis
Testing Einstein's Theory
4 Milky Way Archaeology 69
Shooting Down the Dogma
Canaries in a Coal Mine The Cannibalistic Milky Way
The Spaghetti Factory
5 Galactic Violence: Collisions and Mergers 85
Cosmic Changelings
A Blind Spot
Nuggets from a Survey
A Field Guide to Oddball Galaxies
The Whirlpool Galaxy and Its Companion
The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039)
Ring Galaxies: Ghostly Apparitions
Forging a New Paradigm
6 Quasars: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing 111
From Local Hiss to Distant Roar
Radio Stars?
Energy Crisis
Agony and Ecstasy
A New Constituent of the Universe
Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Quasar
Quasars Throughout the Universe
The Rise and Decline of Quasars
7 Piercing the Galactic "Smog" 139
Far Sighted
Protostars: Galactic Vacuum Cleaners
Evolved Stars: Galactic Smokestacks
Galactic Center, Where Art Thou?
From Oddballs to LIRGs
Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies: Celebrity Rock Stars
8 Starbursts, Superwinds, and Supermassive Black Holes 157
Flashing Galaxies and the Provenance of Helium
Galactic Bubbles
Galactic Winds
Star Formation in the Middle of Nowhere
Maelstrom in the Nucleus
Black Holes: Central Monsters
The Key to the Vault
9 Probing the Gaseous Universe 181
A Spike of Light
Perfect Instrument Meets Perfect Telescope
Quasar Absorption Lines: A Biometric Passport
Gamma-Ray Bursts: High-Beam Dazzlers
10 From Ghosts to Galaxies: The Emergence of Structure 195
Distant Shadows Red and Blue
E+A Galaxies
Ring of Fire
The Far Side of the Universe
Galaxy Clustering and Lyman-a Blobs
Violent Winds
11 Solar System Shuffle 213
The Buccaneers
Jupiter's Hotspots
From Frying Pan to Fire
Lord of the Planets
Incoming!
Bolide Flashes and Splashes
Solar System Refrigerators Fragments from the Oort Cloud
Tallying Pieces of the Puzzle Anatomy of a Murder: The Demise of Pluto as a Planet
Seeking Planet X: Hindsight Seeking Planet Nine
12 Astronomical Exotica: New Frontiers 239
Runts of Star Formation
The Right Stuff
Hitting Pay Dirt with a Common Little M Star
Floating Dirt, Iron Rain, Magenta
Skies, and Violent Storms
In Search of Pale Blue Dots
Pathfinder
Transients, Superluminous Supernovae, and the Future of Observational Astronomy
The Transient Universe
The Fountainhead
Acknowledgments 271
Notes 277
Index 293
What People are Saying About This
“Cosmic Odyssey vividly captures one of the greatest eras in the history of astronomy. Rich in scientific detail and written with an engaging flair, this account by Linda Schweizer—who played a role in the journey—reveals both the triumphs and foibles as 20th-century observers discovered a violent universe never before imagined. This should be required reading for every astronomer-in-training.”
—Marcia Bartusiak, author of The Day We Found the Universe and Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony
“In this extremely well-researched biography of one of astronomy’s ‘sacred mountains,’ Schweizer charts—in vivid and captivating detail—the many discoveries of the near and far universe and the minds and hands that propelled them.”
—Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Professor, Yale University; author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos
“Majestically told, lavishly illustrated, and meticulously documented, Linda Schweizer’s vivid portrayal of the personalities that brought the cosmos into focus—most notably Palomar Mountain, the renowned cosmic cathedral and the book’s protagonist—reads like a novel and is impossible to put down.”
—Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego; author of Losing the Nobel Prize
“The 200-inch telescope at Palomar Mountain ruled as the world’s premier astronomical instrument for 40 years. In Cosmic Odyssey, Linda Schweizer goes beyond the masterful technology to show what this marvel was used for, who was doing it, and what they achieved.”
—Robert P. Kirshner, Professor of Science, Harvard University; author of The Extravagant Universe
“Cosmic Odyssey is an important book that tells the story of the Palomar Observatory, one of the most important groups of scientific instruments in history. Schweizer gives us crystalline detail, deep knowledge of the process of science, and intimate portraits of great astronomers, deepened by years of conducting interviews with them. Cosmic Odyssey is an achievement and a treasure.”
—Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe