Pillars of Creation
How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A 2025 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner
The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing.
Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Award-winning science writer Richard Panek stands us shoulder to shoulder with senior scientists as they conceive the mission, meet decades-long challenges to bring it to fruition, and, now, use its unprecedented technology to yield new discoveries about the origins of our solar system, to search for life on planets around other suns, and to trace the growth of hundreds of billions of galaxies all the way back to the birth of the first stars. The Webb telescope has captured the world’s imagination, and Pillars of Creation shows how and why—including through sixteen pages of awe-inspiring, full-color photos.
At once a testament to human ingenuity and a celebration of mankind’s biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Panek’s eye-opening book reveals our universe as we’ve never seen it before—through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel that is itself a pillar of creation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stellar account, science writer Panek (The Trouble with Gravity) details the James Webb Space Telescope's journey from conception to outer space. He explains how astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi began planning the Webb as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope as early as five years before Hubble's 1990 launch, as well as how NASA had to battle Congress for continued funding as the project ran over budget by billions of dollars and delays pushed back the launch date by over a decade. (Webb finally reached space in 2021.) Conveying the amazing ingenuity involved in constructing the telescope, Panek describes how keeping the heat-sensitive infrared telescope near absolute zero (−459.67ºF) required engineers to devise a sunshield composed of five layers, each thinner than one-thirtieth the width of a human hair, that cumulatively provide SPF ("as in sunscreen lotions") one million. Panek captures tense scenes in mission control as engineers dealt with such challenges as faulty sunshield mechanisms and collisions with micrometeoroids, and he offers a wondrous overview of Webb's major breakthroughs, noting, for instance, that its discovery of water in the asteroid belt has forced astronomers to consider that the habitable zone for life might be larger than previously thought. Brimming with the excitement of scientific discovery, this soars.
