A Brief History Of Black Holes: And Why Nearly Everything You Know About Them Is Wrong

Description

In A Brief History of Black Holes, award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics.

A jaunt through space history . . . with charming wit and many pop-culture references – BBC Sky At Night Magazine

Right now, you are orbiting a black hole.

The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy.

In this cosmic tale of discovery, Dr Becky Smethurst takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings.

She explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time.

Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe – all hidden inside black holes.

About the Author

Dr Becky Smethurst is an award-winning astrophysicist and science communicator at the University of Oxford, specialising in how galaxies co-evolve with their supermassive black holes. She was recently awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Research Fellowship for 2022. Her YouTube channel, Dr Becky, has over 400,000 subscribers who engage with her videos on weird objects in space, the history of science and monthly recaps of space news. A Brief History of Black Holes is her second book; her first, Space: 10 Things You Should Know was named one of Sky at Night Magazine’s Top 20 Books of 2019 and translated all around the world.

Becky presents The Supermassive Podcast in association with the Royal Astronomical Society, receiving thousands of listens every month. She regularly appears on national television and radio to explain the latest space news stories and has been an expert featured on The Sky at Night on the BBC. She jokes that her proudest moment is when she identified a song from Disney’s Frozen in under two seconds during her appearance on Christmas University Challenge.