Black Holes. The Key to Understanding Everything

A brilliant exploration of the most exotic objects in the universe by Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw. At the heart of the Milky Way, there is a distortion in the fabric of the Universe. Caused by something 4 million times bigger than our Sun, it is where space and time are so warped that everything within 12 million kilometres is trapped, even light. This region of no return is called the event horizon, and inside it lies the end of time as we know it. We have named it Sagittarius A* and it is a supermassive black hole. Black holes lie where the most massive stars used to shine and at the edge of our current understanding. They are the inevitable creations of gravity, when too much matter collapses into not enough space. And yet, although the laws of nature predict them, they fail to fully describe them. The wonderful thing about the ever-increasing number of black holes we have discovered dotted across the Universe is that each one is an experiment conducted by nature that we cannot explain. This means we are missing something deep. Black holes are places in space and time where the laws of gravity, quantum physics and thermodynamics collide. Originally thought to…

Год

2022

Язык

английский

ISBN

9780733340444