Morsels of the Night Sky

Book Review: A History of the Universe in 100 Stars

by Florian Freistetter (Quercus 2021 – English translation from the 2019 original German edition)

This title is surely a winner, and indeed this book is acclaimed an International Bestseller. What could be better than a comprehensible history of the universe, told in bite-sized chapters each based on a single star? The format is familiar to anyone who came across BBC Radio 4’s History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor which was a brilliant radio series and later beautiful book. Can Freistetter’s History of the Universe in 100 Stars do for astronomy what MacGregor’s did for history? I am not sure the 100 Stars quite matches up.

There is certainly plenty of variety and interest here: stories from antiquity and recent research, tales of discovery, observation and mystery. And all of the expected characters from the history of astronomy make an appearance together with plenty of others from the European perspective (the book was originally written in German). We find the ancient Greeks estimating the distance to the sun, Galileo and Kepler moving the Earth out of the centre of the universe, Caroline and William Herschel shivering in an English garden, Eddington, and Hubble et al. each expanding and enriching our concepts of the Universe, through to the hunters of exoplanets and other exotic objects like quasars, pulsars and suspected “black dwarfs”.

Not all of the hundred chapters are actually about stars: the chapter on “Hairy Stars” is about comets (the word comet is from the Greek for “hair”!) looks at how they were portents and signs through different times and cultures. Another section is “Sidera Medicea” which is the name originally given by Galileo to the moons of Jupiter, in honour of the powerful Medici family. And “Star 23” is actually a bronze age archaeological find – part of the oldest known physical representation of the sky. These are scattered amongst chapters about Algol – the winking “Daemon’s Eye” which hints that the early Arab astronomers knew it was a variable star; Polaris – one of many “North stars” as the earth’s axis of rotation precesses through the sky; Deneb – which was central to the brilliant work of Cecilia Payne who in the 1920s identified the absorption spectra in starlight and proved what stars are made of.

Dr Freistetter is an Austrian author who worked as an astronomer at the University in Heidelberg in Germany, so he has bags of practical experience and he provides no end of nuggets and factoids: 70 millennia ago, Scholtz’s Star made the closest ever fly-by by a star approaching our sun; huge Gamma Ray Bursts from distant exploding stars have been strong enough to trigger the Nuclear Early Warning satellites in the 1960s; or Antares, the bright red giant in Scorpio which lived fast and died young. So many stories. This book is good to dip into, but I am not sure it does really tell the “History of the Universe” in a coherent way. I guess we will always have more sober textbooks for that. But it really would have benefitted from some pictures or diagrams or star charts – just something to give a little visual stimulus. Nevertheless, it is a book to intrigue and entertain and should draw in any interested reader to ask more questions.

Note

This review appeared originally in the New Zenith, the newsletter of Vectis Astronomical Society (http://www.wightastronomy.org/)

Elsewhere…

• BBC Sounds – A History of the World in 100 Objects – Available Episodes
• Timothy Ferris The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997) – this covers cosmology without getting tangled in the technical undergrowth, but 25 years ago is a long time in terms of both observation and theories.
• Ian Stewart Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe (Profile Books, 2017). This for me is a brilliant and engaging view of Cosmology – not just a snapshot of the best theories of how the Universe works, but a good historical sweep through how we got here, and the tools needed along the way.
• Stuart Clark Towards the Edge of the Universe: A Review of Modern Cosmology (Springer-Praxis, 1999). OK so two decades old but a more serious textbook-style presentation with (not too many) equations to scare the horses and lots of excellent illustrations.