The Milky Way smells of rum and raspberries ...and other amazing cosmic facts

Jillian Scudder

Book - 2022

Astrophysicist Dr Jillian Scudder knows more than most of us what a surreal place the Universe can be. In this light-hearted book she delves into some of the more arcane facts that her work has revealed, and tells us how we have actually managed to discover these amazing truths.

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Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 523/Scudder Due Dec 26, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Trivia and miscellanea
Published
London : Icon Books 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Jillian Scudder (author)
Physical Description
xv, 239 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781785789267
  • Prologue
  • The electromagnetic spectrum
  • The Universe Is the dimmest it's been in billions of years
  • The Universe is beige, on average
  • The galaxy is flatter than a credit card
  • Galaxy collisions don't actually cause any stars to collide
  • The galactic center tastes of raspberries and smells of rum
  • The centers of galaxies can blow galaxy-sized bubbles
  • A distant black hole is surrounded by water
  • Some galaxies look like jellyfish
  • The whole sky glows in neutral hydrogen
  • Some of the stars in the galaxy are just passing through
  • Supermassive black holes can sing a super-low B flat
  • Some black holes could be necromancers
  • Neutron stars colliding gave us gold and platinum on Earth
  • Some objects spin so fast they nearly self-destruct
  • It rains iron on some brown dwarfs
  • We saw a chunk of rock or ice from outside the solar system
  • Io has lakes of lava
  • It rains diamonds on Neptune
  • An exoplanet we thought was made of diamond might be lava instead
  • There's a pitch-black exoplanet
  • The Moon smells of gunpowder
  • You could grow turnips on Mars soil if it weren't full of rocket fuel
  • The Moon once had lava lakes and fire fountains
  • Saturn's less dense than water
  • Venus's surface is new
  • The Moon's wet
  • Some of Titan's lakes might be the flooded remains of explosions
  • Pluto's surface is young, somehow
  • Some asteroids are just piles of rubble in space
  • Jupiter's magnetic field will short-circuit your spacecraft, but Venus will just melt it
  • Europa might glow in the dark
  • Saturn's rings are falling apart
  • Ceres once had volcanoes that erupted with salt water
  • Triton orbits backwards and is doomed
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This entertaining romp by astrophysicist Scudder (Astroquizzical) explores wacky trivia about the universe. Highlighting "some of the more nonsensical things we know about outer space," Scudder discusses such oddities as dense clouds of gas that act as lasers, black holes that "sing" and "blow bubbles" of hot gas, and 'Oumuamua, one of only two asteroid-like objects known to have "swung through our solar system from outside it." Scudder has a knack for homing in on bizarre cosmic phenomena, as when she notes that gas clouds surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way contain the chemical compound ethyl formate, which "helps give raspberries their flavor, and rum its taste." She examines peculiarities in our solar system, noting that Jupiter's moon Io "has lakes of lava" and the atmospheric pressure on Venus has destroyed every probe sent there, and then zooms beyond it, detailing the debate around whether a certain dense exoplanet is made of diamond or covered in lava. From Saturn's slowly decaying rings to diamond rain on Neptune, Scudder delivers entertaining pop science, all explained in accessible prose. Armchair astronomers will come away with a renewed sense of wonder at the strangeness of the universe. (Feb.)

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