Showing titles in Astronomy & Space Science

Brought to you by Penguin. *An instant New York Times Bestseller* A momentous look at the private companies driving the revolutionary new space race, from the 3-million copy, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk In 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the New York Times-bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger space shuttle disaster based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research – riveting history that reads like a...

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But this "witty and clear thinking" (New York Times) book wonders, what about relativity? Physicist Chad Orzel and his inquisitive canine companion, Emmy, tackle the concepts of general relativity in this irresistible introduction to Einstein’s...

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to find yourself strapped to a giant rocket that's about to go from zero to 17,500 miles per hour? Or to look back on Earth from outer space and see the surprisingly precise line between day and night? Or to stand in front of the Hubble Space Telescope, wondering if the emergency repair you're about to make will inadvertently ruin humankind's chance to unlock the universe's secrets? Mike Massimino has been there, and in Spaceman he puts you inside the suit.

The New York Times bestselling, “meticulously researched and absorbingly written” (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission. President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he...

From the longest-serving Flight Director in NASA's history comes a revealing account of high-stakes Mission Control work and the Space Shuttle program that has redefined our relationship with the universe. A compelling look inside the Space Shuttle missions that helped lay the groundwork for the...

Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times best sellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.’ - Carl Sagan Inspired by Sagan’s famous line, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch is a brilliantly accessible introduction to today’s physics by academic and educator Harry Cliff. ‘A fascinating...

A century ago very few people dreamed of space travel. Today it is the most daring and technologically sophisticated quest ever undertaken, being driven not just by government agencies such as NASA and ESA, but also by visionaries such as Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin). To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, this major drama-documentary series charts the definitive story of the past, present and future of humankind’s exploration of space. The Space Race is narrated by Kate Mulgrew and features a full cast.

Brought to you by Penguin. Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the cosmos. One of the biggest questions Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to...

This audiobook explores how the discoveries within the Solar System and of exoplanets far beyond it come together to help us understand the habitability of Earth, and how these findings guide the search for exoplanets that could support life. The author highlights how, within two decades of the discovery of the first planets outside the Solar System in the 1990s, scientists concluded that planets are so common that most stars are orbited by them. The lives of exoplanets and their stars are inextricably interwoven.

There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld. Just six numbers, imprinted in the "Big Bang", determine the essential features of our entire physical world. Moreover, cosmic evolution is astonishingly sensitive to the values of these numbers. If any one of them were "untuned", there could be no stars and no life. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, our place in it, and the nature of physical laws. 

‘It didn’t matter that they were now three miles beyond their target site, that communications were dropping out and that they were running low on fuel. All that mattered to Neil as he searched for a safe spot to land was that boulders littered the surface below. “Thirty seconds,” called mission control. In truth, the flight controllers were now no more than spectators, just like everybody else. No more needed to be said. It was down to Armstrong

All the matter and light we can see in the universe makes up a trivial five per cent of everything. The rest is hidden. This could be the biggest puzzle that science has ever faced. Since the 1970s, astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around: they should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together. That ’something' is dark matter - invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets.

The European Space Agency released a map of the afterglow of the big bang map, which contains anomalies that challenge our understanding of the universe. This is the first book to address what will be an epoch-defining scientific paradigm shift. Will we ever know what happened before the big bang? What's at the bottom of a black hole? Are there universes beyond our own? Does time exist? Are the once immutable laws of physics changing?

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the Cambrian explosion...

A wry and compelling take on the who, how, and why of near-future colonies in space. From bone-whittling microgravity to eye-popping profits, the risks and rewards of space settlement have never been so close at hand.

Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, 20 years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year, he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers. In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. 

In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward. A companion book to the...

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials?