50 Universe Ideas You Really Need to Know

In this, the latest volume in the best selling 50 Ideas series, author Joanne Baker unravels the complexities of the universe for a general readership.

From Heliocentrism to dark matter, and from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and orbits to Olber’s paradox and the Shapley-Curtis debate, she explains ideas at the cutting-edge of scientific enquiry, making them comprehensible and accessible to the layperson.

• Planets and solar system
• Cosmic microwave background
• Supermassive black holes
• Heliocentrism
• Big bang nucleosynthesis
• Galaxy formation and evolution
• Kepler’s laws
• General relativity
• Gravitational lensing
• Galileo
• Special relativity
• Stars: types
• Newton’s laws of motion
• Black holes
• Stars: births of stars
• Gravitation
• String theory
• Stars: deaths of stars
• Spectrum
• Astroparticle physics
• Stars: life cycles
• Milky Way
• Cosmic rays
• The sun: fusion and sunspots
• Doppler shift and redshift
• Higgs boson Pulsars
• Shapley-Curtis debate
• Anthropic principle
• Cepheids and variable stars
• Olbers paradox
• Hubble
• sequence of galaxy types
• Gamma ray bursts
• Hubble’s law
• Dark matter
• Exoplanets
• Cosmic distance ladder
• Large scale structure
• Theories of creation
• Big bang
• Galaxy clusters and voids
• Earth-moon giant impact theory
• Cosmic inflation
• X-ray background
• Astrobiology
• Dark energy
• Radio galaxies
• Fermi paradox
• Matter and antimatter
• Quasars and active galactic nuclei