Chasing Hubble's Shadows: The Search for Galaxies at the Edge of Time

Readers interested in Hubble's promise and achievements will be fascinated to learn more about telescope searches in CHASING HUBBLE'S SHADOWS: THE SEARCH FOR GALAXIES AT THE EDGE OF TIME. History and science blend in a lively dialogue that is a perfect pick for collections catering to lay readers already interested in basic astronomy and Hubble achievements in particular.

I found this book to be a very good report on the current state of the fields of astronomy and cosmology, particularly as to how they are concerned with investigations into the early development of the universe. It is very well balanced for a wide potential audience, neither too technical (with the danger of tuning out those with inadequate scientific knowledge), nor written so simply as to fail to add to our education as we read. I also thought the length of the book was about right, so that I never felt that the book dragged at any point. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the "universe around us", quite literally.

I enjoyed this book because it moves beyond the usual arm-waving of many cosmology books. Kanipe is a journalist, not a scientist, and it helps the book immensely. He explains concepts such as redshift and reionization in clear and understandable terms, and seasons his prose with amusing observations (one cosmologist is described as Keith Richards with a killer Powerpoint presentation). Chasing Hubble's Shadows is also mainly about the frontiers of cosmology - discoveries that are being made now, not rehashes of old science as so many astronomy books can be. I felt as if I were traveling along with the researchers as they pushed the boundaries of knowledge ever-farther. Highly recommended for anyone who wonders how the universe came to be - and isn't that everyone?

When we look out into space we look back in time. When we have the Hubble Space Telescope working for us we look very deep into space and very far back in time, so far back that some of the galaxies that Hubble can see are as they were billions of years ago when the universe was young, when there were few heavy metals, long before the sun came to life, long before (presumably) the birth of our galaxy. What was the universe like then and what can we learn about the properties of the universe and about its evolution from the dim light given off by those very distant galaxies? What science journalist Jeff Kanipe is trying to do in this book is bring the general reader up to date on the latest discoveries and understandings in astronomy and how these discoveries are leading to a better understanding of cosmology. Do galaxies look different as we go back in time? Clearly the very first galaxies consisted of stars containing only hydrogen and helium. How were these stars different from the stars we see around us, from our own sun? And what about the shape and characteristics of the first galaxies? Were they spirals, barred or normal, ellipticals or irregulars? And what role does dark energy and dark matter play in their formation? Kanipe gives up-to-date answers to these questions, and this is one of the strengths of this readable book. Events in astronomy and cosmology move quickly. Books that are even a few years old will be out of date in certain respects. I am always interested in what is, for example, the latest estimate of the age of the universe. Kanipe gives a age of about 14 billion years, which means that light from the most primordial event comes to us from a distance of about 14 billion light years. Actually it is a little less than this since there was a so called "dark age" that lasted until about 13.66 billion years ago at a red shift of (gulp!) 1000. Kanipe typically uses red shift measurements instead of light years to express both distance and time. For example an object 7.3 light years away has a red shift of 0.9. If we look back a mere 70 million years the red shift is a tiny 0.005. One of the most interesting parts of the book is on Kanipe's visit to Mauna Kea, Hawaii where the two great Keck telescopes are housed. He makes vivid the experience of being with the astronomers at their camp at 9,000 feet and atop the mountain in the cold, still air at nearly 14,000 feet. Kanipe's story integrates knowledge from telescopes around the world, including that from infrared, radio and other telescopes. One of the things I like best about the book is that there isn't a lot of repetitive history. Instead, the book is devoted to what is happening now in astronomy. The only difficulty is that there is a lot of information to absorb and some of the ideas are unusual. The terminology also requires some effort to get used to, but Kanipe eschews most jargon and uses almost no mathematics. There are some nice color prints

In less than 200 pages of friendly, engaging prose, the author succeeds in bringing the reader up-to-date on work in the field of cosmology, in particular, galaxies of the early universe. The views of theorists, as well as those of observational astronomers, are presented clearly. Although some ideas that have been proposed to explain certain observations may seem to be a bit far-fetched and difficult to understand by the non-specialist, once the author has discussed them, he has the kindness of going back to the nuts and bolts of the issue at hand and placing the reader's feet back on familiar ground. This very interesting book will be of particular interest to science buffs with a penchant for astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology.