Science But Not As We Know

194 Pages·38.66 MB·English

by  Ben Gilliland

HOW DARK

LS
AR
MATTER BUILT EA
RT QUANTUM
S
THE UNIVERSE
E
HG PHYSICS
S P A C E N
T
I

T
T
O
E
AND THE
O
THE FATAL FRONTIER E
H
M
S
HOW TO CATCH A COMET
INSANELY TINY
CUTTING-EDGE CONCEPTS MADE SIMPLE
HOW BLACK DEATH RAYS

HOLES WORK FROM OUTER
SPACE
THE BIG

STORY BEHIND
THE ATOM
B E N G I L L I L A N D

CUTTING-EDGE CONCEPTS MADE SIMPLE
WRITTEN BY
BEN GILLILAND
CONSULTANT
JACK CHALLONER
S MYSTERIOUS
UNIVERSE
DK LONDON
Senior Project Editor Steven Carton
T
Senior Art Editor Stefan Podhorodecki
How big is the Universe? 6
Editor Francesca Baines
Editorial Assistant Charlie Galbraith
The star that redrew the cosmos 10
Designers Sheila Collins, Mik Gates N
Managing Editor Linda Esposito
Expanding Universe 14
Managing Art Editor Michael Duffy
Jacket Editor Maud Whatley Welcome to the multiverse 18
Jacket Designer Mark Cavanagh
E
Jacket Design Development Manager Sophia MTT We are all doomed! 22
Producer, Pre-Production Luca Frassinetti
Producer Gemma Sharpe Catch up with the 26
Publisher Andrew Macintyre stellar speed demons
T
Publishing Director Jonathan Metcalf
Associate Publishing Director Liz Wheeler Meet the smelly dwarf 30
Design Director Phil Ormerod
N Mercury’s secrets 33
DK INDIA
How to catch a comet 36
Editor Priyanka Kharbanda
Art Editors Supriya Mahajan, Heena Sharma
Saturn’s amazing rings 40
Assistant Editor Deeksha Saikia
O
Assistant Art Editor Tanvi Sahu
The search for alien life 42
DTP Designers Vishal Bhatia, Nityanand Kumar
Picture Researcher Deepak Negi The hostile blue planet 46
Senior DTP Designer Harish Aggarwal
C
Jacket Designer Vikas Chauhan The space rock that “killed” Pluto 50
Managing Jackets Editor Saloni Talwar
Pre-production Manager Balwant Singh
Production Manager Pankaj Sharma
Managing Editor Kingshuk Ghoshal
Managing Art Editor Govind Mittal
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Dorling Kindersley Limited
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL
Copyright © 2015 Dorling Kindersley Limited
A Penguin Random House Company
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
001–275156–04/15
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the copyright owner.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-2411-8419-6
Printed in China
Discover more at
www.dk.com
TO BOLDLY THE APPLIANCE TEENY, TINY,
GO OF SCIENCE SUPER-SMALL STUFF
The first human in space 56 It is only a theory 100 The story of the atom 156
Pioneer 10: the little spacecraft 60 Why does anything exist? 104 Discovering the neutron 159
that could
Leap second 108
The world of the insanely tiny 162
Voyager: our distant emissary 64
A weird, almost perfect Universe 111
The certainty of uncertainty 164
Is there life on Mars? 68
What is dark matter? 114
Colonizing Mars 72 Seeking supersymmetry 168
Why is gravity so weak? 118
Mapping the Milky Way 76 Higgs boson: a bluffer’s guide 172
Dark matter builds the Universe 120
Detecting killer asteroids 78 Quantum gravity 176
We are all made of stars 124
Looking beyond Mars for life 82 X-ray crystallography 179
The story of the pulsar 128
A Webb to catch the oldest stars 86 Particle accelerators 182
Doing the black hole twist 132
ESA’s Rosetta comet chaser 88 Attack of the micro black holes 186
Helium shortage 136
Gravity lensing to see 92
Death rays from outer space 140
the cosmos
Gravity slingshot 142
Engage warp drive! 94 Index 190
Is glass a liquid? 146
Space: the fatal frontier 96 Acknowledgments 192
Curiosity: science’s heart 150
HOW BIG IS THE THE STAR
U N I V E R S E ?
THAT REDREW THE
C O S M O S
E X P A N D I N G UNIVERSE
CATCH UP WITH

EE
H
S
T
R STELLAR SPEED

O
E
T
V
E D E M O N S
MI
T
O
L
C
U
L
E
M
W
WE’RE ALL DOOMED!
T H E S E A R C H F O R
M E E T T H E
S M E L L Y A L I E N L I F E
DWARF
MERCURY’S SECRETS
M Y S T E R I O U S
U N I V E R S E
S A T U R N ’ S
HOW TO CATCH A
KO
COMET
T
C
U
O
L
A M A Z I N G R
P

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CD
R I N G S AE
PL
THE HOSTILE SL
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BLUE PLANET TT
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6 • MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE
HOW BIG IS
THE UNIVERSE?
THAT BIG WHITE SPLODGE ON THE
RIGHT IS THE SPIRAL GALAXY NGC 1345
(we will call this one Terry). Terry lives quite close to our very own
galaxy, the Milky Way – you might say that they are neighbours.
However, closeness is a very relative term indeed. Compared to
the overwhelming vastness of the Universe, Terry lives just a few
doors down the road.
But where does he live in relation to you and me? After all,
if you live in a block of flats in New York City, a few doors down
is just a few paces along the hallway. However, if you live in
the middle of the Mojave Desert, reaching your nearest neighbours
could mean having to hop onto your scooter for a trip of several
kilometres. Given that the scale of the Universe is more like that
of the Mojave than that of the Big Apple, you can be sure Terry
does not live as close as the image implies.
Let us apply some sense of scale 9,500 million million kilometres
to the image. The bright star in (5,900 million million miles) away –
the image (the one with the word that journey would take you about
“star” pointing at it) does not 10 billion years to complete on
actually live in Terry’s house – your scooter (provided you travel
it actually lives in our house (the 24 hours a day at the heady speed
Milky Way) – so it must be pretty of 100 kph (62 mph)).
close. But our house is pretty big, Peer a little deeper into the
so the star is not as close as you image and you can see lots of
might guess. In fact, that pinpoint small galaxies that seem to be
of light is probably a few thousand crowding around Terry. Of course,
light-years away, and that is these galaxies only appear much
still a long way off indeed – smaller because they live much
because a light-year is the further down the road than Terry –
distance that a photon of light, perhaps hundreds of millions of
shooting along at an impressive light-years further down the road.
18 million kilometres a minute It is hard (perhaps impossible)
(11 million miles a minute), can for the human brain to comprehend
travel in a year. distances of this magnitude, but (in
This is how distant
Even if it is as close as a cosmic terms) we have still barely galaxies crowding Terry
thousand light-years away, left the end of the road. To peer look when enlarged
that star is still at least beyond the road and out of town
HOW BIG IS THE UNIVERSE? • 7
Star
Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
IInnnnntttttterrrrsstttttteelllllllar
sscoottterrr!
you need a different image. The (11-and-a-half days). Now, when galaxies really only sit on the
portrait of Terry was taken by you consider that Terry and his cosmic horizon – the Universe
the Hubble Space Telescope using distant neighbours were revealed extends far deeper still.
an exposure of about half an hour after a 30-minute exposure, imagine The Universe is not infinite – it
and, just like using a normal what is revealed after an exposure does have its limits – but because
camera, the longer you expose of more than 11 days. There are it is expanding, you could never
the “film” to light, the more light 10,000 galaxies visible in this image hope to travel to its end. Even
you gather, and the more light you and the most distant is located if you were to soup up your scooter
gather, the fainter the objects 13 billion light-years away – that to be able to travel at the speed
you can see. is a journey of 140 million billion of light, you would still be left
The image in the top right years on your interstellar scooter playing eternal catch-up with
corner is the Hubble Ultra-Deep (you might want to pack a the Universe’s ever-expanding
Field. It is perhaps one of the most sandwich). However, even though frontiers. Suddenly, Terry
profound images ever captured. The you have to travel well beyond the doesn’t seem so far away!
image is the result of an exposure end of the road, out of town and far
amounting to 1 million seconds out into the distance, even these
8 • MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE
HOW BIG IS BIG?
When you see an astronomical object
afloat in the blackness of space,
without a familiar object nearby to
provide some scale, it’s difficult to
appreciate just how big big can be.
So we’ll start with Earth – home
to some 7 billion humans... so
quite big – and go from there...
Earth
EARTH JUPITER
Diameter: 12,756 km Diameter: 142,984 km
(7,926 miles) (88,846 miles)
Crab Cat’s Eye M87
Nebula Nebula black hole
ROSETTE NEBULA CRAB NEBULA CAT’S EYE NEBULA
Diameter: 1,230 trillion km Diameter: 104 trillion km Diameter: 3.78 trillion km
(764.2 trillion miles) (64.6 trillion miles) (2.3 trillion miles)
Rosette
Nebula
Small
Magellanic Milky Way
Cloud
SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (GALAXY) MILKY WAY (GALAXY) IC 1101 (GALAXY)
Diameter: 66,200 trillion km Diameter: 1.14 million trillion km Diameter: 53 million trillion km
(41,134 trillion miles) (708,363 trillion miles) (32.9 million trillion miles)