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Buy Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe by Govert Schilling by Naomi Greenberg-Slovin available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe
by Govert Schilling
by Naomi Greenberg-Slovin
| | List Price: | $49.00 | | Price: | $39.50 | | You Save: | $9.50 (19%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 969350 | | Studio: | Cambridge University Press | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 304 | | Publication Date: | April 29, 2002 | | Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
About three times a day our sky flashes with a powerful pulse of gamma ray bursts (GRB), invisible to human eyes but not to astronomers' instruments. The sources of this intense radiation are likely to be emitting, within the span of seconds or minutes, more energy than the sun will in its entire 10 billion years of life. Where these bursts originate, and how they come to have such incredible energies, is a mystery scientists have been trying to solve for three decades. The phenomenon has resisted study -- the flashes come from random directions in space and vanish without trace -- until very recently. In what could be called a cinematic conflation of Flash Gordon and The Hunt for Red October, Govert Schilling's Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe describes the exciting and ever-changing field of GRB research. Based on interviews with leading scientists, Flash! provides an insider's account of the scientific challenges involved in unravelling the enigmatic nature of GRBs. A science writer who has followed the drama from the very start, Schilling describes the ambition and jealousy, collegiality and competition, triumph and tragedy, that exists among those who have embarked on this recherche. Govert Schilling is a Dutch science writer and astronomy publicist. He is a contributing editor of Sky and Telescope magazine, and regularly writes for the news sections of Science and New Scientist. Schilling is the astronomy writer for de Volkskrant, one of the largest national daily newspapers in The Netherlands, and frequently talks about the Universe on Dutch radio broadcasts. He is the author of more than twenty popular astronomy books, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on astronomy. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
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A modern story of Scientific Discovery 
A few billion years after the Big Bang, a giant star ends its life in a spectacular explosion. In a fraction of a second, it releases more energy than an average star would in a 10 billion year lifetime, including tremendous gamma ray bursts traveling out at the speed of light. These gamma rays radiate out in all directions - some in the direction where the Milky Way galaxy will be born in a few hundred million years. By the time the first of these gamma ray photons have traveled half the distance to this new galaxy, our Sun is born with the Earth following some half a billion years later. Still these gamma rays are continuing on their journey. By the time they reach our Local Supercluster, dinosaurs are ruling the Earth. When they finally reach the outskirts of the Milky Way, the dinosaurs are long gone and the first human predecessors are walking on Earth. As these gamma ray photons approach the Pleiades, Galileo is looking through the first telescope. As they reach Alpha Centauri, a rocket is being launched from Cape Kennedy carrying a military satellite with a gamma ray detector on board. Four years later these gamma rays have completed their 10 billion year journey on July 2, 1967 and are detected by this satellite!
So begins the race to study these mysterious sources of intense gamma radiation and determine their origins. This is what "Flash" is all about. It documents the people who have devoted their lives since 1967 to understand the most powerful explosions in the universe, second only to the Big Bang itself, gamma ray burst. This is a very up-to-date and exciting book with a lot of the human side of scientific investigation described as well as a fair amount of good scientific information. I particularly liked chapter eleven, which has a beautifully written description of stellar evolution. This is a fascinating book on a relatively new phenomenon in this elegant universe in which we are such a small part. You are sure to want to learn more about these awesome sources of power after reading this book. You might want to get the video "Death Star" from PBS, which chronicles gamma ray burst in a way similar to this book.
November 17, 2002 | |
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