By the star physicist and author of multiple #1 Sunday Times
bestsellers, a major and definitive narrative work on black holes and
how they can help us understand the universe.
At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster so deadly it can bend space,
throwing vast jets of radiation millions of light years out into the
cosmos. Its kind were the very first inhabitants of the universe, the
black holes.
Today, across the universe, at the heart of every galaxy, and dotted
throughout, mature black holes are creating chaos. And in a quiet part
of the universe, the Swift satellite has picked up evidence of a
gruesome death caused by one of these dark powers. High energy X-ray
flares shooting out from deep within the Draco constellation are thought
to be the dying cries of a white dwarf star being ripped apart by the
intense tides of a supermassive black hole - heating it to millions of
degrees as it is shredded at the event horizon.
They have the power to wipe out any of the universe's other inhabitants,
but no one has ever seen a black hole itself die. But 1.8 billion light
years away, the LIGO instruments have recently detected something that
could be the closest a black hole gets to death. Gravitational waves
given off as two enormous black holes merge together. And now scientists
think that these gravitational waves could be evidence of two black
holes connecting to form a wormhole - a link through space and time. It
seems outlandish, but today's physicists are daring to think the
unthinkable - that black holes could connect us to another universe.
At their very heart, black holes are also where Einstein's Theory of
General Relativity is stretched in almost unimaginable ways, revealing
black holes as the key to our understanding of the fundamentals of our
universe and perhaps all other universes.
Join Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw in exploring our universe's
most mysterious inhabitants, how they are formed, why they are essential
components of every galaxy, including our own, and what secrets they
still hold, waiting to be discovered.
