In this, the latest volume in the best selling 50 Ideas series, author Joanne Baker unravels the complexities of the universe for a general readership.
From Heliocentrism to dark matter, and from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and orbits to Olber’s paradox and the Shapley-Curtis debate, she explains ideas at the cutting-edge of scientific enquiry, making them comprehensible and accessible to the layperson.
- Planets and solar system
- Cosmic microwave background
- Supermassive black holes
- Heliocentrism
- Big bang nucleosynthesis
- Galaxy formation and evolution
- Kepler’s laws
- General relativity
- Gravitational lensing
- Galileo
- Special relativity
- Stars: types
- Newton’s laws of motion
- Black holes
- Stars: births of stars
- Gravitation
- String theory
- Stars: deaths of stars
- Spectrum
- Astroparticle physics
- Stars: life cycles
- Milky Way
- Cosmic rays
- The sun: fusion and sunspots
- Doppler shift and redshift
- Higgs boson Pulsars
- Shapley-Curtis debate
- Anthropic principle
- Cepheids and variable stars
- Olbers paradox
- Hubble
- sequence of galaxy types
- Gamma ray bursts
- Hubble’s law
- Dark matter
- Exoplanets
- Cosmic distance ladder
- Large scale structure
- Theories of creation
- Big bang
- Galaxy clusters and voids
- Earth-moon giant impact theory
- Cosmic inflation
- X-ray background
- Astrobiology
- Dark energy
- Radio galaxies
- Fermi paradox
- Matter and antimatter
- Quasars and active galactic nuclei