“Mapping the Heavens” by Priyamvada Natarajan

Completed on 11th of March 2017.

Review: 

The focus of the book is our ever-increasing perception of the universe’s vastness. Unfortunately, details of the universe’s structure are not covered in any details. A pleasant surprise was mentioning of morphological analysis devised by Fritz Zwicky.

Inspect the whole Science Section -->

Notes:

Chandra found that stars that were initially 1.4 to 3 times more mass than the sun would end up as neutron stars while those that are ten to twenty-five time more massive than the sun are the ones that would end up as black holes.

A discovery of dark matter existence is described as follows. In our solar system, where the sun’s gravity dominates, the inner planets move faster in their orbits than the outer ones. The farther from the sun the more slowly a planet moves. This is because the force of gravity exerted by the sun weakens with distance, so the outer planets feel much diminished inward pull. Looking at how stars behave in spiral galaxies, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found the opposite – the speeds of stars appeared to be much faster the farther away from the centre they lived. There was only one plausible explanation: there was a considerable amount of unseen mass in the outskirts of galaxies – mass that did not emit light and seemed to keep the stars afloat at the same speed in the outer reaches of galaxies. The dark matter is also responsible for motions of galaxies in clusters and the light deflections they produce.