EAN: 9781849965972

ASTRONOMERS UNIVERSE ORIGINS - STEVE EALES KA...

In the last decade  there has been a revolution in observational astronomy  which has meant
that we are very close to answering three of the four big 'origin questions'  of how the
planets  stars  galaxies  and the universe itself were formed. As recently as 1995 we knew of
only one planetary system: our own. Now we know of over a hundred  and this knowledge has
helped to reveal how planetary systems form. In this same decade  new types of telescope have
allowed us to penetrate through clouds of interstellar dust to see the first moments in the
life of a star  and also to see directly (not infer) what galaxies looked like thirteen billion
years ago  only a billion years after the Big Bang. Because of this new knowledge  we now have
provisional answers to the second and third origin question. The final question is the one we
can't yet answer  but even here there have been big steps towards an answer. Within the last
four years  astronomers have discovered that the universe is geometrically flat and that its
expansion is accelerating  fuelled by a mysterious dark energy. This revolution in our
observational knowledge of the universe - including the first precise measurements of its age
and matter and energy content - has been vital groundwork for new ideas about its origin 
including the possibility that the universe originated in a larger `meta-universe'. Origin
Questions describes  at an understandable and basically non-mathematical level  the origin
questions and the recent steps that have been taken towards answering them.

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