Author(s): Giles Sparrow

Science

A landmark in popular science publishing, Cosmos is a majestic, giant format account of the ultimate journey, a 13.7-billion-light-year (or 130-billion-trillion kilometre) voyage from our home planet to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time. It is illustrated with 450 images of incredible beauty. The vault of stars emblazoning Earth’s night skies are but an infinitesimal fraction of the hundreds of billions that inhabit our galaxy and there are at least as many galaxies in the universe as there are stars in the Milky Way. Cosmos makes sense of this dizzying celestial panorama by exploring it one step at a time, illustrating the planets, moons, stars, nebulae, white dwarfs, black holes and other exotica that populate the heavens with some of science’s most spectacular photographs.