Review: Extreme Cosmos

by Jeff Foust
Monday, July 16, 2012

Extreme Cosmos: A Guided Tour of the Fastest, Brightest, Hottest, Heaviest, Oldest, and Most Amazing Aspects of Our Universe
by Bryan Gaensler
Perigee, 2012
softcover, 256 pp.
ISBN 978-0-399-53751-6
US$16

The scale of the universe can often boggle the mind. The masses, distances, temperatures, and other characteristics of the various objects that comprise the observable universe are often so far removed from our day-to-day experiences that they can be difficult to comprehend. It’s little wonder, then, that the world “astronomical” has come to not only refer to astronomy, but also to any huge number that defies conventional understanding.

What’s more, continuing discoveries further expand those astronomical scales, as researchers discover ever more distant, larger, or otherwise more extreme objects. These discoveries make good fodder for news articles, but these reports often don’t delve beyond the superlative itself: for example, every several months there is news of a new most-distant object discovered, with a fractionally higher redshift, but often without putting that discovery into context for what that means about our understanding about the origins and early development of the universe.

In Extreme Cosmos, Australian astronomer Bryan Gaensler does provide the big picture about those extremes of the universe. At first glance, the book appears to be superficial, organized into chapters that look at various extremes, from mass and time to temperature and electromagnetism. In those chapters, though, he goes beyond simply identifying the biggest and smallest, or hottest and coldest, objects, explaining why and how they’ve reached those extremes and what they mean for our broader understanding of the universe.

Gaensler writes in a conversational tone, drawing upon his own experiences to help illustrate and add color to these discussions. (One quibble: in the section on density, he uses the units of ounces per cubic centimeter, an odd mashup of imperial and metric units; the rest of the book generally uses imperial units.) Interestingly, the book doesn’t include any photos or other illustrations, an odd omission given the highly visual nature of astronomy and the ability of images and diagrams to communicate relative sizes and scales. Despite this lack of illustration, Extreme Cosmos is still a fine guide to the range of physical characteristics of objects in the universe—and, more importantly, explaining their relevance.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site and the Space Politics and NewSpace Journal weblogs. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the official positions of any organization or company, including the Futron Corporation, the author’s employer.

Home