Einstein's Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes

by Chris Impey

Overview

“[A] skillfully told history of the quest to find black holes.” —Manjit Kumar, Financial Times

Black holes are the best-known and least-understood objects in the universe. In Einstein’s Monsters, distinguished astronomer Chris Impey takes readers on a vivid tour of these enigmatic giants. He weaves a fascinating tale out of the fiendishly complex math of black holes and the colorful history of their discovery. Impey blends this history with a poignant account of the phenomena scientists have witnessed while observing black holes: stars swarming like bees around the center of our galaxy; black holes performing gravitational waltzes with visible stars; the cymbal clash of two black holes colliding, releasing ripples in space time. Clear, compelling, and profound, Einstein’s Monsters reveals how our comprehension of black holes is intrinsically linked to how we make sense of the universe and our place within it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357509
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	611,171
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Chris Impey is a distinguished professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona and the critically-acclaimed author of Beyond, How It Began, and How It Ends, and four other books, as well as two astronomy textbooks. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xv

Foreword xvii

Part A Evidence for Black Holes, Large and Small 1

1 The Heart of Darkness 3

An English Clergyman Imagines Dark Stars 3

A Great French Mathematician Weighs In 5

Understanding the Fabric of Space-Time 7

A Singularity and a Life Cut Short 12

The Master of Implosions and Explosions 14

Coining the Perfect Term for the Inscrutable 16

A Genius Struggles with Gravity and Disease 18

Betting on Black Holes 23

The Golden Age of Black Hole Theory 26

2 Black Holes from Star Death 30

The Forces of Light and Darkness 30

Gravity and Darkness Are the Final Victors 33

Finding the First Black Swan 38

Weighing the Invisible Dance Partner 40

Black Holes with Gold-Plated Credentials 43

Using Gravitational Optics 47

Physics at the Edge of the Maelstrom 50

A Tour of the Binary Star Bestiary 54

3 Supermassive Black Holes 57

The Only Radio Astronomer in the World 57

Galaxies with Bright Nuclei 61

Radio Astronomy Comes of Age 62

A Dutch Astronomer Discovers Quasars 68

Astronomers Harvest Distant Points of Light 71

Hypothesizing Massive Black Holes 74

Mapping Radio Jets and Lobes 77

The Zoo of Active Galaxies 81

A Matter of Perspective 85

4 Gravitational Engines 88

The Big Black Hole Next Door 89

Stars at the Edge of the Abyss 93

The Dark Core in Every Galaxy 95

Baron Rees of Ludlow Tames the Beast 100

Using Quasars to Probe the Universe 103

Weighing Black Holes by the Thousand 106

Accretion Power in the Cosmos 113

Massive Black Holes Are Not Scary 116

Part B Black Holes, Past, Present, and Future 121

5 The Lives of Black Holes 123

Seeds of the Universe 123

First Light and First Darkness 125

Black Hole Birth by Stellar Cataclysm 129

Finding the Missing Links 133

Simulating Extreme Gravity in a Computer 137

How Black Holes and Galaxies Grow 143

The Universe as a Black Hole 148

Making Black Holes in the Lab 150

6 Black Holes as Tests of Gravity 153

Gravity from Newton to Einstein and Beyond 154

What Black Holes Do to Space-Time 158

How Black Holes Affect Radiation 162

Inside the Iron Curtain 166

X-Rays Flickering Near the Abyss 168

When a Black Hole Eats a Star 171

Taking a Black Hole for a Spin 174

The Event Horizon Telescope 177

7 Seeing with Gravity Eyes 181

A New Way of Seeing the Universe 181

Ripples in Space-Time 185

An Eccentric Millionaire and a Solitary Engineer 188

When Black Holes Collide 194

The Most Precise Machine Ever Built 197

Meet the Maestro of Gravity 204

Viewing the Universe with Gravity Eyes 207

Collisions and Mergers of Massive Black Holes 213

Gravity and the Big Bang 216

8 The Fate of Black Holes 219

The New Age of Gravity 219

Quasar on Our Doorstep 224

Merging with Andromeda 227

The Biggest Black Holes in the Universe 230

The Era of Stellar Corpses 234

A Future of Evaporation and Decay 236

Living with Black Holes 239

Notes 245

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

08/13/2018
Science writer and astrophysicist Impey (Beyond: Our Future in Space) gives an absorbing and lay-reader-friendly look at the intriguing dead stars called black holes. Impey begins in 1784 with the earliest theoretical description of a massive star with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. In the early 20th century, Einstein suggested with his general theory of relativity that astronomers could find black holes by looking into how their extreme gravity affects space-time around them. With clarity and enthusiasm, Impey describes the work of scientists such as John Wheeler—who coined the name “black hole”—and visionary theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking, as well as his own work. In subjects including the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy and primordial black holes, Impey gives readers a good sense of how these phenomena have gone from astronomical curiosity to intellectual touchstones that fascinate and challenge researchers. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Impey skillfully weaves a fascinating tale out of the work and ideas of the scientists who…pieced together the history of black holes."

Financial Times - Manjit Kumar

"Black holes were originally flights of theoretical fancy, difficult for even professional physicists to wrap their brains around. In Einstein's Monsters, Chris Impey shows how modern astronomy has brought them into vivid focus, and conveys how much more we're learning about these extreme beasts with every passing year."

Sean Carroll

"[Einstein's Monsters] will wow the general-interest science audience."

Booklist (starred review)

2018-08-21

A lucid tour of "the best known and least understood objects in the universe."

A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. It's a concept that has long fascinated astronomers and continues to generate a steady stream of popular science books. In his latest, Impey (Astronomy/Univ. of Arizona; Beyond: Our Future in Space, 2015, etc.) delivers an accessible yet definitely not dumbed-down explanation of this spectacular phenomenon. From its inception, most scientists accepted Einstein's 1915 Theory of Relativity, which described gravity as a distortion of space-time by a nearby mass. When his equations revealed that immense gravity would distort space-time so much that light would double back on itself, most scientists, Einstein included, assumed this was a mathematical curiosity. It wasn't. Within the past 100 years, writes Impey, "black holes have evolved from a monstrous idea, one that violates common sense, to a proving ground for the most cherished theories in physics." An ordinary black hole forms when a star ages, runs out of fuel, and collapses. Most shrink into dwarves, but when this happens to the rare star with a mass greater than 20 times that of the sun, no known force can prevent it from collapsing to an infinitely dense point called a singularity, surrounded by a black hole. Stranger still, at the center of every galaxy, including ours, is an immense "supermassive" black hole containing millions or billions of solar masses. A good writer as well as a specialist in black holes, Impey works hard and mostly successfully to illuminate complex phenomena without resorting to the TV documentary magic show (entertainment trumping explanation) and includes plenty of personal anecdotes, imaginative analogies, and useful illustrations.

Readers who remember freshman college physics or astronomy will have an easier time, but few will regret encountering such irresistible astrophysical wonders.

Kirkus Reviews