Gravity's Engines
The Other Side of Black Holes
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
We have long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end - mysterious chasms so destructive and unforgiving that not even light can escape their deadly power. Recent research, however, has led to a cascade of new discoveries that have revealed an entirely new, and crucially important, side to black holes. Super-sized versions, often billions of times more massive than the Sun, lurk in every galaxy in the universe. And these chasms don't just vacuum up everything around them; they also spit out huge clouds of matter and energy. In Gravity's Engines, renowned astrophysicist Caleb Scharf reveals how these giant black holes profoundly rearrange the cosmos that surrounds them, controlling the number of stars in the galaxies and, in turn, the entire universe.
With lucidity and elegance, Scharf traces the two hundred year history of our attempts to discover the nature of black holes, from an English academic turned clergyman in the late 1700's who first identified these 'dark stars' to Einstein and the great revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. Engaging with our deepest questions about our origins, he takes us on an intimate journey through our endlessly colourful universe, revealing how the cosmic capacity for life is ultimately governed by - and perhaps could not exist without - black holes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Weird, destructive, time-warping, overwhelming, alien... fearsomely noisy and rambunctious," black holes are the bad boys of the universe. And according to Scharf, director of Columbia University's Astrobiology Center, black holes also play a critical role in shaping the universe. With gravity so great that not even light can escape, massive black holes are invisible. The only way to detect these "lords of gravity" is by looking for the energy from the shock waves created as they gulp down matter. Thanks to X-ray telescopes like the Chandra Space Telescope, astronomers have found energy coming from the hearts of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. After a quick, nontechnical overview of how black holes are created, Scharf discusses how they power galactic dynamics. The most massive grow dim relatively quickly, exhausting their food supply, while a smaller black hole can burn for billions of years, varying from "simmering" beast to "blazing pyre" and back. They cast off ripples of energy, pushing galactic dust and gases outward and slowing stellar formation. Scharf's explanations are vivid and accessible, evoking the awe of cosmic grandeur in a way that's as humbling as it is fascinating.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating
After a slow start when I almost put this book down, it quietly started to become fascinating. The sheer scales involved are utterly beyond comprehension............a galaxy 14 million light years across, for example. Rather sets you back on your heels and puts our existence into some sort of perspective.
If you want to understand a little more about how the universe was formed and how it works, then this book s very accessible and is actually a good read too.