Book Review: Things That Go Bump in the Universe, by C. Rene James – The New York Times

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE UNIVERSE: How Astronomers Decode Cosmic Chaos, by C. Rene James

There is one particular pulsar, a type of quick-spinning dead star, that holds the current record for the fastest rotation of any celestial body in the known universe 716 times per second. By contrast, the blade of a Vitamix can turn around 333 times every second, but a blender is small enough to sit on a countertop, and a pulsar is a city-size ball of neutrons that floats in space and contains the mass of half a million Earths.

One can read numbers like this and think, Oh, thats interesting, writes the astronomer C. Rene James in her new book, Things That Go Bump in the Universe. One can also feel that grasping the reality is impossible. But, she says, You should still try.

Pulsars may seem unfathomable, but they are worth studying both for their own sake they are among the weirdest things in the cosmos and for the insight they can offer. They can help us measure the distance between suns and advance our knowledge of nuclear physics. A pulsar like the record-setting PSR J1748-2446ad, which James usefully renames Zippy, is a key tool in the relatively new field of transient astronomy: the study of fast, short-lived, violent phenomena in what we otherwise perceive as a mostly empty and unblinking universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope and its siblings have revealed fascinating portraits of a cosmos spangled with stars, clouds of dust, filaments of gas and the whirling arms of galaxies. Things That Go Bump in the Universe introduces several of the most unusual cosmic characters in these realms, including the extremely abundant and ghostly particles known as neutrinos, which seemingly interact with nothing after they are born, whether they arise in horrifically violent stellar death throes or in the natural decay of the potassium in bananas. We also meet black widow pulsars (over eons they consume their binary-star companions) and see black holes merge. One such collision 1.2 billion years ago made space-time around the Earth shudder in 2015.

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Book Review: Things That Go Bump in the Universe, by C. Rene James - The New York Times