First Light
Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time, revised edition
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Opens a window into a previously dark and secret time in our universe's history: when the first stars were born.
Astronomers have successfully observed a great deal of the Universe's history, from recording the afterglow of the Big Bang to imaging thousands of galaxies, and even to visualising an actual black hole. There's a lot for astronomers to be smug about. But when it comes to understanding how the Universe began and grew up, we are literally in the dark ages. In effect, we are missing the first one billion years from the timeline of the Universe.
This brief but far-reaching period in the Universe's history, known to astrophysicists as the 'Epoch of Reionisation', represents the start of the cosmos as we experience it today. The time when the very first stars burst into life, when darkness gave way to light. After hundreds of millions of years of dark, uneventful expansion, one by the one these stars suddenly came into being. This was the point at which the chaos of the Big Bang first began to yield to the order of galaxies, black holes and stars, kick-starting the pathway to planets, to comets, to moons, and to life itself.
Incorporating the very latest research into this branch of astrophysics, this book sheds light on this time of darkness, telling the story of these first stars, hundreds of times the size of the Sun and a million times brighter, lonely giants that lived fast and died young in powerful explosions that seeded the Universe with the heavy elements that we are made of. Dr Emma Chapman tells us how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She also offers a first-hand look at the immense telescopes about to come on line to peer into the past, searching for the echoes and footprints of these stars, to take this period in the Universe's history from the realm of theoretical physics towards the wonder of observational astronomy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Astrophysicist Chapman debuts with a spirited history of the early universe when stars "roared to life." Her focus is on the period "from 380,000 years after the Big Bang to about 1 billion years after it," known as the dark ages because of how little is known about it. Chapman begins by explaining light and the electromagnetic spectrum, and from there, surveys the first stars in the universe, Population III stars. The standard hypothesis, she explains, is that the stars were formed by gravity, combustion, and nuclear fusion acting upon clouds of gas. Chapman brings things up to the present with an outline of the ways astronomers are searching for data in the stars with huge arrays of terrestrial radio telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Chapman's tone is conversational, and she has a knack for breaking down complex scientific material (the dark ages' "missing cosmological data is equivalent to missing everything from the moment of conception to the first day of school"), though she can go on distracting tangents (as with a digression on King Tut's tomb as a lead-in to "stellar archaeology"). Nonetheless, those looking for an introduction to stellar evolution will find much here to dig into.
