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"In Pillars of Creation, award-winning science writer Richard Panek presents the first complete account of the James Webb Space Telescope-the $10 billion NASA instrument whose stunning images have captured the world's imagination and are revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos. Moving from the near and now to the farthest and earliest, Panek shows how everything we thought we knew about our own solar system, our galaxy, and the birth of the universe itself has been touched and transformed by the Webb's findings. Drawing on access to the project's most senior scientists and featuring a selection of the most astonishing color images taken by Webb, Pillars of Creation explains the big theoretical takeaways that the mission has already generated, and points to future areas of research-and even future missions-that will expand our horizons further still. A celebration of mankind's biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Pillars of Creation unveils the genius and contingency behind this groundbreaking invention and reveals, in glittering detail, how it has ushered in a thrilling new era of celestial knowledge"--
About the author
Richard Panek is the author of numerous books including
The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award and was longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (in Science Writing) and the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, he is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of
The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a
New York Times bestseller. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, and his writing about science and culture has appeared in publications including the
New York Times, the
Washington Post,
Scientific American,
Discover,
Smithsonian,
Natural History,
Esquire, and
Outside. He lives in New York City.
Summary
A breathtaking tour of the cosmos through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, revealing how the mission originated, how it's been executed, and how its spectacular images are rewriting our understanding of the universe.
