Exploding Stars and Invisible Planets

November 25, 2019
Astronomer Watson (Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope) explores a bounty of subjects from his field in this intriguing and accessible view of cutting-edge astrophysics. Watson begins close to home, looking at the features that make Earth unique, the (to him) inevitable continued expansion of human activity into space, and the question of how to minimize environmental contamination when exploring other worlds. He then takes up the mysteries that only grow more fascinating as scientists peer into them: the secrets of black holes and dark matter, the Big Bang, and how the violent death of one star can initiate long-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing style is clean and concise, and the illuminating explanations of the book’s various topics—which also run to meteors and meteorites, the weather on other planets and the search for extraterrestrial life—are accessible to casual readers. Among other vivid details, he recounts how Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, an early theorist about intelligent extraterrestrials, deduced that the Moon’s populace had built “circular embankments to protect themselves from the Sun’s radiation,” and describes a gold-tinted, perfectly hexagonal hurricane at the North Pole of Saturn. Watson explains and entertains to equally strong effect.

November 15, 2019
British astronomer Watson (Why Is Uranus Upside Down? And Other Questions About the Universe, 2007, etc.) takes readers on a genial tour of the known--and imagined--universe. "A typical place in the Universe is empty, cold and dark. And nothing in our experience can quantify just how empty, cold and dark it is." So, with a nicely dramatic touch, writes the author, a pioneer in optics, long resident as a researcher in Australia, with an asteroid named in his honor. He has been on the astronomical scene for decades and is thus well positioned to track the development of theories on such matters as the nature of dark matter and, closer to home, the formation of the Earth's moon. On the latter, he discards older notions that the moon was formed by accreted space debris and instead examines the "most popular contemporary theory," namely that some large body, such as the "Mars-sized collider" called Theia, ran into Earth early in the planet's history and threw a moon-sized section into orbit around the planet. The theory is not without its problems, but Watson is on the spot with research less than a year old that indicates that the moon is made mostly of "terrestrial magma, rather than rocky debris from Theia." The evolution-of-ideas theme carries over to the famed Big Bang theory, which has been reverberating in one iteration or another for a century but has recently been complicated by the notion of "dark energy" and its role in the speed with which the universe expanded during those billions of explosive years. "The acceleration kicked in," writes Watson, "only when galaxies were far enough apart for dark energy to begin to overcome gravity." The author writes accessibly, and though some of the discussions may be a touch dense for readers without a background in astronomy, he doesn't shy away from telling tales out of school, as when he reveals that one supposed signal from across the universe turned out to be a burst of radiation from a microwave oven in the lunchroom. An up-to-the-minute, entertaining revelation for armchair explorers of deep space.

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