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This book offers a spectacular and clearly written account of the Hubble telescope's development, early struggles, and recent astonishing findings on brown dwarfs, massive black holes in the centers of galaxies, the Kuiper Belt of solar system bodies beyond Pluto, and other groundbreaking discoveries.
List of contents
1 From Babylon to Cape Canaveral.- Larger, Higher, More Expensive... From Simple Tools to the Telescope of the Nineties.- Space Astronomy-Picture Window to the Universe.- The Hubble's Thorny Path into Space.- Why an Optical Telescope in Space?.- From the Idea to the Countdown.- In Orbit.- The Scandal of the Defective Mirror.- Hubble's Difficult Years.- The Servicing Mission.- 2 The New Window to the Universe: The Hubble and Astronomy.- The Great Questions: How Large and How Old Is the Universe?.- Cepheids.- Globular Clusters.- The Hubble and the Big Bang Helium.- Island Worlds in Space and Time: Galaxies and Quasars.- Gravitational Lenses in the Universe.- Are Quasar Theories Out of Date?.- Mysterious Galaxies.- Large and Small Lights: The World of Stars.- The Most Massive Stars.- The Least Massive Stars.- Families and Clans of Stars: Open and Globular Clusters.- Gas and Dust: Of Life and Death of Stars.- The Orion Nebula: Nursery of Stars and Planets?.- Jets and Star Formation.- Planetary Nebulae: A Colorful Finale.- Close-up of Stellar Death: Supernova 1987A.- A Stellar Ruin: The Cirrus Nebula.- A Different Kind of Stellar Explosions: Novae.- Our Galactic Home-The Solar System.- Are We Alone in the Universe?.- Where Are the Limits of Our Solar System?.- Pluto.- Neptune.- Uranus.- Saturn.- Taking Aim at Jupiter.- The Asteroids.- Mars.- 3 Hubble At Work-And Looking Beyond.- Working with Hubble.- Hubble's Next Decade.- What Comes After Hubble?.- 4 Appendix.- Want to See More?.- Further Reading.
