The Universe

Every night, above our heads, a drama of epic proportions is playing out. Diamond planets, zombie stars, black holes heavier than a billion Suns. The cast of characters is extraordinary, and each one has its own incredible story to tell.

We once thought of our Earth as unique, but we have now discovered thousands of alien planets, and that’s barely a fraction of the worlds that are out there. And there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on every planet in the Solar System. But amid all this vastness, the Milky Way Galaxy, our Sun and the Earth are home to the only known life in the Universe – at least for now.

With a foreword from Professor Brian Cox, and access to all the latest stunning NASA photography, Andrew Cohen takes readers on a voyage of discovery, via the probes and telescopes exploring the outer reaches of our galaxy, revealing how it was formed and how it will inevitably be destroyed by the enigmatic black hole at its heart. And beyond our galaxy, the expanding Universe, which holds clues to the biggest mystery of all – how did it all begin? We now know more about those first moments of existence than we ever thought possible, and hidden in this story of how it all began are the clues to the fate of the Universe itself and everything in it.

• TV TIE IN TO THE 5-PART, PRIME TIME, BBC SERIES

• PRESENTED BY BRIAN COX

• FULLY ILLUSTRATED THROUGHOUT

• COMPANION TO THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER – THE PLANETS by Andrew Cohen with Professor Brian Cox

Every night, above our heads, a drama of epic proportions is playing out. Diamond planets, zombie stars, black holes more massive than a billion Suns. The cast of characters is extraordinary, and each one has its own incredible story to tell.

The scope of this book is almost incomprehensible. It’s 25 trillion miles to our nearest neighbouring star, and there are 150 billion stars in our galaxy alone. At 13.7 billion years old and expanding at 67 kilometres a second, the Universe is so vast it seems audacious to imagine we can even begin to explore it. But that’s exactly what we have done. A new era of astronomy, driven by technological advances and new telescopes, has fundamentally transformed our view of the universe, making the 20th century’s telescopes look like something used by Galileo.

Chapters cover the birth of a star in a stellar nursery, the power of a supermassive black hole as it flings a sun across space so fast it’s still travelling 10 million years later, and the chaos created as two galaxies collide. And then we’ll go back in time to the day without a yesterday, to witness the very beginning of time and space itself.
Huge advances in scientific understanding mean that for the first time we can explore places we didn’t even know existed just ten years ago. We’ll come face to face with the Universe’s most surprising characters, and learn how their fates are intertwined with our own. It’s a drama of cosmic proportions.

Competition: The;Planets;Almanac;A;Brief History of Time;Astrophysics for people in a hurry;Stargazing;Guide to the Night Sky;Cosmos;Seven brief lessons on physics;Human Universe;Limitless. Brian Cox;Stephen Hawking;Neil Degrasse Tyson;Carlo Rovelli;Carl Sagan;Tim Peake