Voyage to the Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic SpaceA.A. Knopf, 1994 - 355 síður Seeking to explain how astronomy is made and what he himself does, Alan Dressler tells the story of a decade-long study he undertook with six colleagues to determine whether the universe has expanded smoothly and symmetrically since its creation. He leads us through the research step-by-step. We see close up the background of each scientist involved in the project. We discover how they work together; how their complementary skills - and their differences - are instrumental in their formation of hypotheses about our origins, and how these hypotheses must be proven or modified one by one if we are to find explanations for phenomena that can rarely be directly observed in detail. We watch the team probing intergalactic space and arriving ultimately at the discovery that our Milky Way galaxy and its neighbors are moving toward a Great Attractor - a distant continent of matter, mostly invisible, containing thousands of galaxies. A gripping account and exploration - clear and challenging and poetic - of what drives the scientist to feats of discovery: the search for order and the overwhelming need to know why things happen as they do. |
Efni
Baby Steps | 25 |
Islands in the Space Sea | 50 |
A Night at Las Campanas | 81 |
Höfundarréttur | |
8 aðrir hlutar ekki sýndir
Common terms and phrases
astronomers atoms Attractor average baryonic big bang big bang model brightness bulk flow Campanas Centaurus Centaurus clusters color Coma cluster correlation cosmic microwave background curved dark matter Dave Davis delta-delta density direction disk distance distribution of galaxies donald diameter Donald Lynden-Bell Earth electrons elliptical galaxies energy example fluctuations force galaxy's Gary glow gravity Higgs Hubble expansion Hubble's human idea intensity km/sec large peculiar velocities large-scale streaming light-years Local Supercluster look luminosity Lynden-Bell mass measurements metal abundance Milky Way galaxy motion moving nebulae neutrinos night observations Observatory orbits parameter particles pattern peculiar velocities percent photons physicists physics picture predicted radio redshift region relative result Roberto Roger sample Santa Cruz scientists Seven Samurai showed space spectra spectrum spiral galaxies stars structure superclusters survey telescope temperature Terlevich tion velocity dispersion Virgo Virgo cluster voids