Turn Right At Orion

Mitchell Begelman

Jan 2008 · Sold by Basic Books

About this ebook

This ingenious book is the account of an epic astronomical journey, a tale told by an early-twenty-first-century human sailor among the stars. The account is discovered, as an alien "translator's note" reveals, sixty million years in earth's future -- the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far-distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the center of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars, almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole -- and all the while Begelman explains in clear and vibrant prose the way things work in the cosmos. A powerful imaginative work that is thoroughly grounded both in history and in the latest in astrophysical thinking and observation, Turn Right at Orion is serious science that reads like fiction.

About the author

Mitchell Begelman is Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of many research papers on astrophysics and the co-author -- with Sir Martin Rees -- of the acclaimed popular science book, Gravity's Fatal Attraction, which won the 1996 American Institute of Physics Writing Award.