November 1, 2013

1 min read

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Book Review: Voyager

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By Lee Billings

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Voyager: 101 Wonders between Earth and the Edge of the Cosmos
by Stuart Clark
Atlantic Books, 2013

Beautiful images abound in books about the depths of space; beautiful words are far more rare. In Voyager, Clark, a veteran astronomy journalist, gives us both, explaining the science behind the most gorgeous vistas from space telescopes and interplanetary probes. The odyssey begins on Earth, before leaping out through the solar system, then to nearby stars, finally to surrounding galaxies and the frontiers of existence itself. What look to be bullets piercing bull's-eye targets are in actuality galaxies plowing into one another; star-forming molecular clouds almost seem to be turbulent swirls of cream against a background of dark coffee. Gemstones scattered across black velvet prove to be clusters of galaxies at the opposite end of the cosmos, and a map of the universe's largest structures is the spitting image of microscopic branching neurons. In Clark's capable hands, the wonders of the night sky become delightfully familiar.

Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

More by Lee Billings
Scientific American Magazine Vol 309 Issue 5This article was published with the title “Voyager” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 309 No. 5 (), p. 78
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1113-78a
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