"Here is the essential companion to Welcome to the Universe, a New York Times bestseller that was inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course for non science majors that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton. This problem book features more than one hundred problems and exercises used in the original course-ideal for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the original material and to learn to think like an astrophysicist.Whether you're a student or teacher, citizen scientist or science enthusiast, your guided tour of the cosmos just got even more hands-on with Welcome to the Universe: The Problem Book.The essential companion book to the acclaimed bestseller features the problems used in the original introductory astronomy course for non science majors at Princeton University organized according to the structure of Welcome to the Universe, empowering readers to explore real astrophysical problems that ar

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all--from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel. Describing the latest discoveries in astrophysics, the informative and entertaining narrative propels you from our home solar system to the outermost frontiers of space. How do stars live and die? Why did Pluto lose its planetary status? What are the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? How did the universe begin? Why is it expanding and why is its expansion accelerating? Is our universe alone or part of an infinite multiverse? Answering these and many other questions, the authors open your eyes to the wonders of the cosmos, sharing their knowledge of how the universe works. Breathtaking in scope and

"If you go out and simply look up, everything - from the Moon to the planets to the stars to the band of the Milky Way - appears to be pasted on the two-dimensional surface of the dome of the sky. Yet, the story of astronomy as a science is how, over time, astronomers have discovered the cosmos in depth. It is the story of the measurement of position and distance, and how our 2D view of the sky above us evolved into a more sophisticated comprehension of the real 3D depths of space. The distances to the stars were first measured using the parallax effect - that is, by comparing the view from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit. This is the same effect that your brain uses (comparing the views from your left and right eyes) to effortlessly give you depth perception. In this book, the authors present the most spectacular stereo images available in astronomy. (Stereo images are pairs of images of the same object, taken 6 months apart - which, as the Earth turns, means viewed from opposite

"This is a condensed edition of Welcome to the Universe - essentially a pocket-sized version of the original "astrophysical tour" of the cosmos. In 8 chapters (compared to the original 24 chapters), the reader learns the essential astrophysics everyone should know -- about the size and scale of the universe; the solar system; the lives/deaths of stars; the search for life in the galaxy; our Milky Way; galaxies, the Big Bang and the expanding universe; inflation and the multiverse; and our future in the cosmos. For those who may have felt that Welcome to the Universe was a bit beyond them, this book covers all the essentials in an even more accessible and concise fashion, while imparting real physical insight into how the universe works by the book's end"--