The Astronomy Book

Big astronomy ideas, simply explained

Explore planets, stars, galaxies, and the almost unimaginable vast scale of time and space with this comprehensive look at the cosmos.

Follow a breathtaking story from Galileo inventing a telescope and discovering Jupiter's moons in 1610, to the unveiling of Uranus, Pluto, Neptune, followed by a myriad of other planets and galaxies.

See how one discovery enabled many more—for example, the detection of radio emissions in the 1950s allowed astronomers to map the spiral structure of our galaxy and find new phenomena such as quasars and pulsars. The Astronomy Book explores the waves of discovery, breaking down the big ideas such as relativity, gravity, and dark matter into easy-to-understand concepts, and shows how one idea prompted the next.

It presents biographies of famous thinkers including Albert Einstein, Johannes Kepler, and Gerard Kuiper and explores the technology that enabled them to further unravel the mysteries of space.

This accessible guide also describes inspiring projects such as the ambitious Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is creating a field guide to the heavens, as well as the robotic scouts on planet Mars.

Part of DK's popular Big Ideas series, The Astronomy Book is an enthralling introduction to this trailblazing science and our Universe.