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An Earthling's Guide to Outer Space: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Black Holes, Dwarf Planets, Aliens, and More
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About An Earthling's Guide To Outer Space: Everything You
Product Description Beloved science commentator Bob McDonald takes us on a tour of our galaxy, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and helping us navigate our place among the stars. How big is our galaxy? Is there life on those distant planets? Are we really made of star dust? And where do stars even come from? In An Earthling’s Guide to Outer Space, we finally have the answers to all those questions and more. With clarity, wisdom, and a great deal of enthusiasm, McDonald explores the curiosities of the big blue planet we call home as well as our galactic neighbours—from Martian caves to storm clouds on Jupiter to the nebulae at the far end of the universe. So if you’re pondering how to become an astronaut, or what dark matter really is, or how an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, look no further. Through a captivating mix of stories, experiments, and illustrations, McDonald walks us through space exploration past and present, and reveals what we can look forward to in the future. An Earthling’s Guide to Outer Space is sure to satisfy science readers of all ages, and to remind us earthbound terrestrials just how special our place in the universe truly is. About the Author Bob McDonald has been the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks since 1992. He is a regular science commentator on CBC News Network and science correspondent for CBC TV’s The National. He has been honoured with the 2001 Michael Smith Award for Science Promotion from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the 2002 Sandford Fleming Medal from The Royal Canadian Institute; and the 2005 McNeil Medal for the Public Awareness of Science from the Royal Society of Canada. In November 2011, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2014, an asteroid designated 2006XN67 was officially named BOBMCDONALD in his honour. Bob lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Visit him on Twitter @CBCQuirks. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: How Big Is Our Galaxy? 1 How Big Is Our Galaxy? Our Earth is floating through a beautiful whirlpool of stars almost too large to imagine. We call our galaxy the Milky Way because it looks like someone spilled milk across the night sky. You can see it with your own eyes, but it’s a little tricky. You have to find a dark place where there are no streetlights, away from towns and cities, on a clear night when the moon is not up. If you can find a spot like that—in the country, beside a lake, on a farm—and look up on a summer night, you’ll see a ghostly glow arcing across the entire sky, a bridge of stars that reaches from horizon to horizon. That’s our home galaxy. But there’s much more to it than meets the eye. Looking up from the ground at night, we don’t see the whole galaxy because we’re inside it, the same way you can’t see your entire town or city from your front door. If you could soar above the Milky Way, what a spectacular sight you would witness—a luminous swirl of stars with four graceful, curving arms wrapping around one another in a pinwheel shape. Our sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars on that merry-go-round. We live on the inside edge of one of the galaxy’s curving arms, about two-thirds of the way out from the center, and the nearest star to our sun is more than four years away at the speed of light. If you wanted to travel around the entire galaxy the way fictional starships in movies do, you’d need a fast ship—one that could move at the speed of light, at the very least. And that is crazy fast. At light speed, you’d cover three hundred thousand kilometers, or seven times around the Earth, in one second. You could visit the moon and come home again in a second and a half, or travel to Mars in twenty minutes. But even traveling at that incredible speed, it would still take you thirty thousand years to travel from Earth to the center of the galaxy. And if you tried to cross from one side to the other, it would take one hundred t
