The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE LAST STARGAZERS The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers EMILY LEVESQUE
An astronomer pulls back the curtain on the ‘rigors and delights and jerry-rigging absurdity’ of the past century of observational astronomy, while looking ahead to a future in which robots, not humans, peer skyward in pursuit of the Universe’s secrets. Emily Levesque’s 15-year career as an observational astronomer has been full of surprises, hardships, worldwide travel and awe-inspiring discoveries. She’s shared that road with a unique cohort, a group of astronomers braving mountain passes, subzero temperatures, poisonous or otherwise hostile fauna and flora, and the pulse-quickening technical difficulties of telescopes the size and weight of apartment buildings. In THE LAST STARGAZERS, she weaves together the incredible episodes and experiences of over a hundred astronomers and observatory employees to build a narrative history of observational astronomy, offer a tour d’horizon of the research behind our current understanding of the Universe and reveal the transformative developments in the field’s immediate future. That future includes the rise of robotic telescopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope – a triumph of modern technology, able to map the Universe in unprecedented detail and generate dozens of terabytes of data in a single night. The LSST will usher in a new age rich in data and potential discoveries, but it will also signal the end of a certain type of human discovery and creativity that has been with us since Galileo. THE LAST STARGAZERS tells these human stories not simply to preserve them but also to remind us that our ingenuity and curiosity should not be wholly sacrificed in the pursuit of gleaming columns of big data. Levesque’s own story shows us that brilliant scientists can do more than move the wheel of scientific progress forward; they can also inspire future generations to take up the effort. EMILY LEVESQUE is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. She received her BSc in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. From 2010 to 2015 she was an Einstein Fellow and Hubble Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2014 she was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Prize by the American Astronomical Society, and in 2017 she was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. Her primary research area is observational stellar astrophysics, with an emphasis on the explosive supernova deaths of massive stars. She has observed for upwards of 50 nights on almost all of the world’s largest optical telescopes, visiting more than a dozen leading observatories (including Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile). She has also been a principal investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope and has led research using data from the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as gravitational waves. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Sourcebooks (US)/Oneworld (UK) Publication: 4 August 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 336 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Oneworld), US & Canada (Sourcebooks), Korea (Sigongsa)
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