Download or read book The Life History of a Star written by Kelly Easton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Donald Justice wrote in "On a Picture by Burchfield" that "art keeps long hours," he might have been describing his own life. Although he early on struggled to find a balance between his life and art, the latter became a way of experiencing his life more deeply. He found meaning in human experience by applying traditional religious language to his artistic vocation. Central to his work was the translation of the language of devotion to a learned American vernacular. Art not only provided him with a wealth of intrinsically worthwhile experiences but also granted rich and nuanced ways of experiencing, understanding, and being in the world. For Donald Justice--recipient of some of poetry's highest laurels, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry--art was a way of life. Because Jerry Harp was Justice's student, his personal knowledge of his subject--combined with his deep understanding of Justice's oeuvre--works to remarkable advantage in For Us, What Music? Harp reads with keen intelligence, placing each poem within the precise historical moment it was written and locating it in the context of the literary tradition within which Justice worked. Throughout the text runs the narrative of Justice's life, tying together the poems and informing Harp's interpretation of them. For Us, What Music? grants readers a remarkable understanding of one of America's greatest poets.
Download or read book The Life and Death of Stars written by Kenneth R. Lang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how stars are born, how they evolve and their ultimate fates, for a broad general audience.
Download or read book Life with a Star written by Jiří Weil and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set during the Nazi occupation of Prague, Life with a Star records the day-to-day life of Josef Roubicek, an ex-bank clerk, who discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. "One of the most powerful works to emerge from the Holocaust; it is a fierce and necessary work of art".--The New York Times.
Download or read book Star of the Sea written by Janet Halfmann and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn about what life is like for a starfish, also called a sea star.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Stars written by Lisa Harvey-Smith and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Secret Life of Stars, award-winning astronomer Lisa Harvey-Smith takes us on a cosmic journey to meet some of the weirdest, most extreme, and enigmatic stars in the universe. We all know the Sun, the powerhouse of our solar system, but what about Luyten’s Flare, the Rosino-Zwicky Object, or Chanal’s variable star? For those whose curiosity takes them far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, The Secret Life of Stars offers a personal and readily understood introduction to some of the Galaxy’s most remarkable stars. Written by award-winning astronomer Lisa Harvey-Smith, each chapter explains various different and unusual stars and their amazing characteristics and attributes, from pulsars, blue stragglers, and white dwarfs, to cannibal stars and explosive supernovae. With beautiful chapter illustrations by Eirian Chapman, this book brings to life the remarkable personalities of these stars, reminding readers what a diverse and unpredictable universe we live in and how fortunate we are to live around a stable star, our Sun.
Download or read book Stars A Very Short Introduction written by Andrew King and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every atom of our bodies has been part of a star. Our very own star, the Sun, is crucial to the development and sustainability of life on Earth. This Very Short Introduction presents a modern, authoritative examination of how stars live, producing all the chemical elements beyond helium, and how they die, sometimes spectacularly, to end as remnants such as black holes. Andrew King shows how understanding the stars is key to understanding the galaxies they inhabit, and thus the history of our entire Universe, as well as the existence of planets like our own. King presents a fascinating exploration of the science of stars, from the mechanisms that allow stars to form and the processes that allow them to shine, as well as the results of their inevitable death. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The Life Cycles of Stars written by Charles River and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading When people look up into the night sky, the stars seem fixed and immutable, as unchanging as the darkness of space itself, but the truth is that stars are born, live and die in a never-ending cycle of creation and annihilation. These cycles stretch over such vast spans of time that, to short-lived humans, they seem to last forever. No one knows just how many stars there are, but their number is almost beyond comprehension. When people look up into the night sky, they can see further than they might guess: up to 19 quadrillion miles, the distance to Deneb in Cygnus, a star that is visible from most inhabited parts of Earth. In total, around five thousand stars are visible to the naked eye, though only around two thousand are visible at any one time from a particular place on Earth. All the visible stars are bigger and brighter than the Sun. Of course, there are many more known stars than those that can be seen with the naked eye. Astronomers estimate that in the Milky Way, there may be more than three hundred billion stars, and every other galaxy may have a similar number of stars. How many galaxies are there in the Universe? Again, no one is certain, but most astronomers agree that there must be many billions. Stars begin as vast clouds of dust and gas within galaxies and are known as nebulae. Due to Newton's Law of Global Attraction, the densest areas in these nebulae pull-in matter from the surrounding space. The more mass they gain, the more mass they attract. Over time, this accumulation can lead to the creation of a star. From that moment on, an eternal battle begins: gravity tends to contract the star while its growing inner pressure tends to expand it. Nebulae are stellar nurseries, the places where stars are created and an essential part of the life cycle of the Universe. Stars do not last forever. Over time they gradually lose energy and finally die. This process of the creation of new stars and the gradual death of existing stars is part of a vast, cosmic process of recycling that continues all the time. However, that raises the question of how the very first stars were formed and that in turn leads to questions about the origin of the Universe itself. However, the life cycle of stars also has a direct relationship to life here on Earth. Singer Joni Mitchell famously included the line "we are stardust" in her hit song "Woodstock." Surprisingly, it seems that she was absolutely right. In the beginning, the Universe comprised hydrogen, small quantities of helium, minuscule amounts of lithium and almost nothing else. Stars are the engines that provide the raw material from which life itself as well as stellar bodies are created. Each star is like a factory that uses nuclear fusion to convert hydrogen into helium and that in turn is used to create carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and many other elements. When a star dies, it ejects its outer layers, throwing these elements off as cosmic dust. The gravity of planets attracts and captures this dust which settles on the surface, introducing new elements. It is estimated that more than forty thousand tons of cosmic dust arrives on Earth every year and this process has continued as long as there has been a planet Earth. Some of the tiny pieces of dust (most are smaller than one-hundredth the width of a human hair) are very old indeed. Scientists have found what they call "original stardust" on meteorites and asteroids. Many of these have been drifting in space since before the Sun was created. The elements in this dust are the fundamental building-blocks of life and every living organism on Earth is created from elements that were originally produced in long-dead stars. It seems that humans and everything else on the planet really did begin as stardust.
Download or read book This Star Won t Go Out written by Esther Earl and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller! “This moving read will have you reaching for the tissues and smiling with delight….Stunningly alive on the page, Esther shows that sometimes the true meaning of life—helping and loving others—can be found even when bravely facing death.” –People Magazine, 4 stars In full color and illustrated with art and photographs, this is a collection of the journals, fiction, letters, and sketches of the late Esther Grace Earl, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 16. Essays by family and friends help to tell Esther’s story along with an introduction by award-winning author John Green who dedicated his #1 bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars to her. Learn more about Esther at tswgobook.tumblr.com.
Download or read book What Stars Are Made Of written by Donovan Moore and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the revolutionary scientific thinker who discovered what stars are made of. But her name is hard to find alongside those of Hubble, Herschel, and other great astronomers. Donovan Moore tells the story of Payne's life of determination against all the obstacles a patriarchal society erected against her.
Download or read book Neutron Stars Black Holes and Gravitational Waves written by James J Kolata and published by . This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, made a remarkable prediction: gravitational radiation. Just like light (electromagnetic radiation), gravity could travel through space as a wave and affect any objects it encounters by alternately compressing and expanding them. However, there was a problem. The force of gravity is around a trillion, trillion, trillion times weaker than electromagnetism so the calculated compressions and expansions were incredibly small, even for gravity waves resulting from a catastrophic astrophysical event such as a supernova explosion in our own galaxy. Discouraged by this result, physicists and astronomers didn't even try to detect these tiny, tiny effects for over 50 years. Then, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, two events occurred which started the hunt for gravity waves in earnest. The first was a report of direct detection of gravity waves thousands of times stronger than even the most optimistic calculation. Though ultimately proved wrong, this result started scientists thinking about what instrumentation might be necessary to detect these waves. The second was an actual, though indirect, detection of gravitational radiation due to the effects it had on the period of rotation of two "neutron stars" orbiting each other. In this case, the observations were in exact accord with predictions from Einstein's theory, which confirmed that a direct search might ultimately be successful. Nevertheless, it took another 40 years of development of successively more sensitive detectors before the first real direct effects were observed in 2015, 100 years after gravitational waves were first predicted. This is the story of that hunt, and the insight it is producing into an array of topics in modern science, from the creation of the chemical elements to insights into the properties of gravity itself.
Download or read book The Boy Whose Head Was Full of Stars written by Isabelle Marinov and published by Enchanted Lion Books. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful picture book about the astronomer Edwin Hubble that invites children to ponder How many stars are in the sky? How did the universe begin? Where diid it come from?
Download or read book The Star of Life written by Edmond Hamilton and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-12-14 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kirk Hammond was a man alone. He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death. Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species. Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.
Download or read book Mendelssohn is on the Roof written by Jiří Weil and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, has received orders to remove from the roof of Prague's concert hall the statue of the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. But which of the figures adorning the roof is the Jew? Remembering his course on racial science, Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue they have carefully chosen begins to topple does he recognize that it is not Mendelssohn; it is Richard Wagner. Thus begins a story of disarming simplicity that traces the transformation of ordinary lives in Nazi-occupied Prague. Death abetted by the petty malevolence of Nazi functionaries wins all the battles but ultimately loses the war, defeated by the fragile flowering of courage and defiance.
Download or read book The Tiny Star written by Mem Fox and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful and gentle story about life and death from beloved author Mem Fox, illustrated by rising star Freya Blackwood; its star imagery, and sense of rebirth make it a perfect choice for the holiday season. In this touching and timeless story, a star falls to earth where it becomes a baby and is embraced and cared for by the community. Renowned author Mem Fox's tender text about the journey of life is beautifully rendered by Freya Blackwood whose luminous illustrations capture the warmth and complexity of growing up. This a unique and moving story to be cherished by all ages and shared for generations to come. "Mem Fox's books are like a warm blanket; they have a way of making the world seem a little cosier." --Sunday Age (Australia)
Download or read book Probable Impossibilities written by Alan Lightman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.
Download or read book Star Maker written by Olaf Stapledon and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-24 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction-roman.
Download or read book Empire of the Stars written by Arthur I. Miller and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the idea of "black holes" explores the tumultuous debate over the existence of this now well-accepted phenomenon, focusing particular attention on Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
