Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems

by Ken Croswell

Book Overview

Are we alone? In 1995 planet hunters discovered the first alien solar system around a star like our own Sun. Ken Croswell tells the fascinating story of this discovery and the people who made it, then... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684832526
• ISBN13: 9780684832524
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Planet Quest: Great for beginners!

Planet Quest is a great book for all you armchair astronomers who want to learn more! I am not an astronomer or even an amateur astronomer, in fact, Planet Quest is only the Third book I've read on the subject but my interest is growing. Planet Quest is very easy to understand because all of the scientific jargon is followed by words and explanations that beginners, like you and me, can follow. Read this book, you won't be disappointed!

Excellent, detailed, informative and a good read.

Ken Croswell's book, "Planet Quest" is a must for anyone interested in the search for planets outside of the solar system. The book reads well, telling a fascinating story from the beginnings of speculation about the existence of alien worlds right up to the present when information is coming to us all the time about strange new worlds around distant stars. Anybody with an interest in the possibilities of life elsewhere must read this book.

Great book about the search for extrasolar worlds.

The first pages of the book will place you back to the past in the year of 1600, in the time when Giordano Bruno, fifty-one-year-old former priest, was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition and executed, only because of his beliefs of which one was that the stars were other suns which were circled by planets like the Earth. After more than 300 years, people still dream about planets like the Earth, but this time they aren't alone, and the Inquisition is gone. :)In the next few chapters the author will familiarize you with the four astronomical ingrediens of life, guide you through our own Solar system in the search for patterns in the data, compare our Sun with other similar stars and discuss how and why planets are formed. After that, there follows a visit to the Sun's distant outposts and history of discovery and search for Uranus, Neptune, Vulcan - the Phantom planet; Pluto and Planet X. Then journey to the stars begins and the next stop is Alpha Centauri, the closest stellar neighbor after our Sun. Chapter by chapter, you will learn where is our Sun in the stellar pyramid, what spectral types are best suitable for life conditions on local planets, how long life span that kind of stars should have, etc. The book explains many more things than mentioned above, and in the next half of it, it will explain how planets can be detected, where Vega, Beta Pictoris and Folmahaut are in the story about search for extrasolar worlds, and how we could promptly confuse ourselves with misinterpreted data. Where should we draw a border for the definition of the planets? Small brown dwarfs and big Jupiter-like planets can be similar in mass and behaviour when looked from our perspective, but why are they different? Will the planets like Jupiter and Saturn guard or destroy life in the extrasolar systems? After many years of searching, the first planets are found around Pulsars - in a place where almost nobody expected to find them. After the discovery of first "regular" planets, the list of extrasolar planets was becoming bigger and bigger. How the planets were discovered? What are the techniques most efficient, and what are the most promising? How interferometry works, and how can it be used?When you start to read Planet Quest, it will be hard for you to stop. Many pages of the book are the interviews and excerpts from interviews which the author has made with astronomers like Clyde Tombaugh, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Shiv Kumar, Andrew Lyne, Geoffrey Marcy, Paul Butler, Alan Boss, Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz and many more. Every astronomer has his own story to tell, so you end up with many short stories, written by many authors, and not just the author of the book.After final chapters, you have the Catalogue of planets with stellar and planetary data, an extensive glossary, notes and big bibliography.

An informative and enjoyable documentary of planet finders.

Croswell takes us on a journey of exploration from the discovery of distant planets within our own solar system to the discovery of brown drawfs and planets in orbit around other stars. I found this book to be both informative and enjoyable to read. The recent events in the discovery of extra-solar planets are known to many of us but this book describes much more than simply a chronology of planets found in successful searches. It also details the theories and theorists that made predictions long before observations of these small bodies was possible. Croswell interviewed many of the scientists actually involved in the search for planets. Whether successful or not, he outlines many of the techniques that were tried in the search and the reasons why some are better at discovering some types of planets than others. By the end of the book I felt I truly knew the mind of a planet hunter. The book lets you relive the thrill of the find, the embarrassment of observational errors and the despair of years of negative results. Reading this book is quite easy, more like a novel than non-fiction. Like most well-made historical documentaries it is exciting to recount the events even when you know the final outcome.

A great book

Before reading "Planet Quest", I was completely ignorant on this subject; I just assumed that someone found the planets sometime ago and that'd be good enough for me. That is no longer the case after going through the pages of "Planet Quest". With a clear, simple style of writing, the author offered readers like me wonderful insights into the thrilling process of hunting for a new planet. This is a non-fiction work, but I felt captivated as if reading Jules Verne novels! When following the stories of planet hunters with their glories and their defeats, I could conclude that life is much better than fiction. Good analogies were offered throughout to explain complicated details, especially to illustrate those infinite statistics on the immense universe. I do appreciate this eye-opening experience, which definitely enriched my knowledge in many ways.