100 Stars That Explain the Universe

Our own Sun--a source of awe, myth, and mystery for untold generations of sky-gazers--is just one of roughly two hundred billion trillion stars. Together, they’re a window into the profoundest questions in physics--overturning, again and again, how we understand light, matter, time, and existence itself. Florian Freistetter explains all this and more, in brief, easy-to-read profiles of the hundred most history-making stars, inviting readers to gaze into the past and future of the universe alongside a stellar cast of scientists-- from Annie Jump Cannon, who revolutionized how we classify the stars, to Dorrit Hoffleit, who first counted them. Enjoy your journey through the cosmos . . .

• GRB 080319B, the farthest we’ve seen into space with the naked eye
• V1364 CYGNI, pivotal in the discovery of dark matter
• 72 Tauri, definitive evidence for Einstein’s theory of relativity
• Algol, called the Demon Star for its mysterious blinking--and many more!

Publisher’s note: 100 Stars That Explain the Universe was previously published in hardcover as The Story of the Universe in 100 Stars.

Florian Freistetter, PhD, is a freelance science journalist and the author of several popular science books on astronomy, including Isaac Newton: The Asshole Who Reinvented the Universe. He has published more than five thousand articles on his blog, Astrodicticum Simplex, which is one of the most-read German-language science blogs. He writes a weekly column about mathematics for spektrum.de, as well as many other articles for a variety of publications. He lives in Germany