Astronomy & Space Science

By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities...

The earth is bigger than you've been shown and there are undiscovered and secret lands beyond the polar ice. This is the first evidence-based book on the topic. Instead of focusing on anecdotal hearsay, it presents maps, historical accounts, old newspaper clippings, cultural traditions and modern scientific evidence to prove that the mainstream view of the world is false. Equipped with real proof, this book rekindles your sense of exploration and adventure, expands your thinking and helps you dare venture where few have gone before.

Why we shouldn’t colonize Mars or the Moon, or even vacation there If certain business titans, corporations, and governments have their way, humans will someday be living, working, and vacationing in space. This is the much-vaunted New Space Age, and in Lunacy, philosopher Ben Bramble explains...

Sir Patrick Moore’s Journey to the Stars is a classic space documentary series that takes viewers on a journey through the solar system, historical space exploration, and deep space phenomena. Hosted by the beloved English astronomer, the series explores the Moon, planets, the Apollo programme, and deep space objects.

Sir Patrick Moore’s Journey to the Stars is a classic space documentary series that takes viewers on a journey through the solar system, historical space exploration, and deep space phenomena. Hosted by the beloved English astronomer, the series explores the Moon, planets, the Apollo programme, and deep space objects.

For most of human history, people have asked what the world is made of. Atoms, said the ancients. Particles and fields, said the moderns. Vibrating strings, said the late twentieth century. Each answer named some kind of substance — a stuff out of which everything is built. Each answer ran, in the end, into the same wall: a list of unsolved problems that could not be addressed without inventing more substances, more particles, more dimensions of stuff. The framework presented in this book takes a different route.

*Winner of the 2025 Utah Book Award in Memoir/Narrative* *A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024* An immersive exploration of the nightly presence that has captured our imagination for the entirety of human history. In the luminously told Still As Bright, the story of the Moon traverses time and...

Twelve light-years from Earth, a star burns quietly in the constellation of the Whale. It is the nearest solitary star that resembles our Sun—a little older, a little cooler, a little poorer in the heavy elements from which planets are made. For sixty years, astronomers have trained the world’s finest instruments on Tau Ceti, searching for planets, for signals, for signs of life. What they have found is something more unexpected and more instructive: a masterclass in the limits of human knowledge.

In 1965, two engineers in New Jersey tried to blame pigeons for a noise that would not go away. The noise turned out to be the oldest light in the universe, still arriving from every direction at once, cooling by one ten-billionth of a degree with every minute that passes. That light has been called the afterglow of the Big Bang — a phrase that is, strictly speaking, wrong. The cosmic background radiation is not the universe being born. It is the universe becoming transparent, roughly three hundred eighty thousand years after an event that had already quietly set the stage.

Look upward and begin an unforgettable journey through the universe. Written for curious readers without advanced scientific training, Astronomy for Beginners offers an approachable introduction to the planets, stars, and celestial phenomena that fill the night sky. Hereward Carrington begins...