Books & Spoken Word
Jo Dunkley: Our Universe
Astrophysicist and award-winning champion of women in STEM, Jo Dunkley, introduces her new book, Our Universe.
The book reveals the remarkable history of our universe and its discovery, from the first star catalogues etched into ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, to the metres-wide telescopes constructed in Chile’s Atacama Desert today.
She tells the remarkable, previously-overlooked stories of pioneering astronomers, such as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who proposed a ground-breaking thesis for the composition of stars, Vera Rubin, who found that galaxies were clustered together in space rather than being scattered randomly, and Annie Jump Cannon who classified about 250,000 stars during her lifetime and developed the system of stellar classification still used today.
But extraordinary advances in our understanding of the wider universe have led us to even greater mysteries. What happened in the first moments after the Big Bang? What are the mysterious ‘dark’ parts of the universe? And what happens in those parts of space where conditions are so intense that our laws of physics break down? Dunkley guides us through the history of our universe as we know it, taking us to the heart of these many unsolved questions.
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