OUR ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE

A scientific tour de force Dr Becky Smethurst Highly recommended Tristan Gooley Extravagantly entertaining warmly informative Lev Parikian A fascinating look at the strange and alien side of space Dr Lucy Rogers The BBC presenter of Sky at Night and Gresham Professor of Astronomy Chris Lintott takes us on an astonishing tour of bizarre accidents big characters and human error to tell the story of some of the most important astronomical events of the past hundred years Our first views of the earliest galaxies were brought to us by the Hubble Space Telescope when it was pointed at absolutely nothing The ice covered Enceladus one of Saturn s nearly one hundred moons was revealed as a possible habitat for life after a by chance fly by of NASA s Cassini probe on a mission elsewhere Pulsars the spectacular remnants of long dead massive stars were discovered as scruff in the data for measurements of the twinkling of possible radio stars As new telescopes are built on mountaintops and in deserts around the world aiming to transform our view of t