Galactic Encounters Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time's End

About this book

The Milky Way galaxy is perhaps the grandest structure of which we are a part (along with the galaxy of neurons which is the human brain itself). Long perceived as the milky path across the night-sky and first revealed, in all its beauty and detail, in the wide-angle photographs of the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard in the late 19th and early twentieth century, we have now mapped it in detail and begun to explore its strange contents – from spiral arms in which new stars are being born from dust clouds to the Monster Black Hole that lies in its center.

More than almost anything else knowable to man, the view of the Milky Way stretching across the Cave of the Night as seen from a dark and pristine site suggests an image of eternity. Indeed, the Milky Way's vast system of 100,000 million stars is ancient – some 13 billion years old. But it is not a static and unchanging system; it is an evolving system. We have now begun to excavate – like archaeologists – the wreckage of star systems assimilated into it; we have learned that it is not a closed system – its gas is being replenished from the intergalactic medium – and this influx of gas sustains structures like the spiral arms that would otherwise be evanescent and revives the bursts of new star clusters. We realize that the familiar and mathematically idealized forms of the Hubble classification system – elliptical galaxies through barred and Grand Design spirals – though they provide a reasonable fit to the objects in the nearby universe do not describe well the violently disturbed exotica of the early universe. Drawing on the insights gleaned from a host of space telescopes probing galaxies across the electromagnetic spectrum and to the edge of the universe, the authors provide a map of our own star-system in space and unfold the stages of its development across time. The view is one of the Galaxy – and its place in the universe – as never before.

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Biography

William Sheehan is an American astronomical historian and writer, who has written the authoritative (and much-acclaimed) biography of Milky Way photographer and pioneering astronomer E. E. Barnard, The Immortal Fire Within. A regular scholar-in-residence at leading observatories including Yerkes, Lick, Lowell, and Mt. Wilson, he is currently working on a biography of stellar spectroscopist and galaxy morphologist W. W. Morgan, who discovered the spiral-arm structure of the Milky Way in 1951. As a professional psychiatrist as well as an astronomer, he has a unique insight into the personalities of the pioneering figures of the history of science. He has published a number of books on the history of Solar System studies, especially on the Moon and Mars, and is a consulting editor of Sky & Telescope, a 2001 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (for his research on the Milky Way), recipient of the Gold Medal of the Oriental Astronomical Association (the first Caucasian to receive that award), etc., etc. Asteroid no. 16037 is named in his honor (Sheehan).

Christopher Conselice, an astronomer at the University of Nottingham, is one of the world's leading experts on galaxy formation and evolution. He was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconson-Madison, and has held post-doctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He was a regular contributor to Mercury, the magazine of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He has published his research in the leading professional journals of astronomy, including Science, Nature, and the Astrophysical Journal.

Julian Baum is one of the world's most highly regarded astronomical artists. His work was featured in Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, The Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in Chester, England.