Overview
I remember sitting spellbound, watching the movie When Worlds Collide. Two planets hurled through space toward Earth while scientists and engineers frantically raced to complete a rocket ship that would take them to safety. In the final moments the spaceship lifted off as the occupants watched the Earth bulge, crack, then literally explode as one of the planets struck it. As I left the theater I wondered if it was really possible for another world to collide with Earth. Later I learned that while many catastrophic collisions no doubt occurred early in the his tory of the solar system, today they are exceedingly rare. I was relieved, but in another sense I was disappointed (not that I hoped a collision of this type would actually occur). A collision of two objects in space, say, two stars, I was sure would be a spectacular event. It is quite unlikely, however, that we will ever witness the collision of two stars. The event is just too rare. But collisions of systems of stars-galaxies-oddly enough, are relatively com mon. In fact, we see evidence of several in the sky right now.
Full Product Details
Author: Barry R. Parker
Publisher: Springer Science+Business Media
Imprint: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
Edition: Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1990
Dimensions:
Width: 13.30cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 20.30cm
Weight: 0.356kg
ISBN: 9780306435669
ISBN 10: 0306435667
Pages: 298
Publication Date: 01 January 1990
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
In contrast to his earlier, all-encompassing expositions on the universe (Search for a Supertheory, 1987; Creation, 1988), the Idaho State physicist-astronomer focuses here on galaxies, those island universes Kant foresaw to be composed of stars like our own Milky Way. Not until the 1920's was there convincing evidence (thanks to the work of Edwin Hubble) that there are indeed worlds beyond worlds made up of billions of stars. What followed was a taxonomy of galaxies (spirals, ellipticals, and peculiars ) and much theorizing about their evolution and destiny. The study of galaxies took off after WW II, when radio astronomy came into its own and it was discovered that active as opposed to inactive galaxies had cores that transmit intense synchrotron radiation at radio frequencies and often at higher frequencies as well. The source? Supernova remnants. . .black holes. . .quasars. . .colliding galaxies: case-by-case analyses are offered here. The idea of colliding galaxies is particularly intriguing, given their myriad numbers and their huge spread in space. (Yet the probability of individual stars colliding is nfl since the stars are so far apart.) The advent of supercomputers has made it possible to model collisions as well as mergers of galaxies and leads Parker to final conjectures on how clusters and superclusters of galaxies have formed. An image of the universe as soapsuds emerges, with the soap bubbles being voids surrounded by chains of galaxy superclusters. As always, Parker tempers the heady theorizing with portraits of personalties and the promise that more and better technology will resolve current debates. We believe him. (Kirkus Reviews)
