Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people. A f ...

3. Let There Be Light After the big bang, the main agenda of the cosmos was expansion, ever diluting the conce ...

become weaker and weaker, they never stopped being photons. What’s next on the spectrum? Today, the universe ...

Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to ...

building a detector specifically to find the CMB. But they didn’t have the resources of Bel ...

pulse of energy in the form of a photon soars away into the wild red yonder. By then, some regions ...

into something more than mythology. But it was the accurate and detailed map of the cosmic microwave backg ...

4. Between the Galaxies In the grand tally of cosmic constituents, galaxies are what typically get counted. ...

As detailed in chapter 9, without the benefit of telescopes operating in multiple bands of light ...

In the high-density environment of clusters, two or more large galaxies routinely collide and leave ...

than light, then our cherished galaxies in clusters would appear as insignificant blips amid a giant ...

Meanwhile, quasar light commonly passes through regions of space that contain monstrous sources of gravit ...

prediction of quantum physics has been dubbed the “vacuum energy,” which manifests as an outwa ...

5. Dark Matter Gravity, the most familiar of nature’s forces, offers us simultaneously the best and the least u ...

colleagues. Zwicky studied the movement of individual galaxies within a titanic cluster of them, located far ...

astrophysics. Across the decades that followed Zwicky’s work, other galaxy clusters revealed the ...

six times the total gravity of all the visible matter. Further research has revealed that the dark matter cann ...

The discrepancy between dark and ordinary matter varies significantly from one astrophysical environment to an ...

description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations o ...

Even if any of these fantastical accounts prove true, none of it would change the successful invocation o ...