Book Review: The Collapsing Universe

The Collapsing Universe

The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Good Doctor once again explains Cosmology in lucid terms. He starts off with simple premises, known facts, composes and slowly leads up to higher concepts, ultimately leading to the concept of "Black Hole". The book had a "trill" factor to it, as we discover the nature of black holes and what constitutes a black hole and how the universe might have formed. I was "wow"ed by this book.

Some exciting learning here with this book. I learnt about the following:

  • Cygnus_X-1 Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus and was the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole. It was discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources detectable from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux density of 2.3×10−23 W/(m2⋅Hz) (2.3×103 jansky). It remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. The compact object is now estimated to have a mass about 21.2 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms.

  • https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/cygnusx1.html

  • Chandra_X-ray_Observatory The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a Flagship-class space telescope launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2025. Chandra is one of the Great Observatories, along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991–2000), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (2003–2020). The telescope is named after the Nobel Prize-winning Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Its mission is similar to that of ESA's XMM-Newton spacecraft, also launched in 1999 but the two telescopes have different design foci, as Chandra has a much higher angular resolution and XMM-Newton higher spectroscopy throughput.

  • Schwarzschild_radius The Schwarzschild radius is a parameter in the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's field equations that corresponds to the radius of a sphere in flat space that has the same surface area as that of the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole of a given mass. It is a characteristic quantity that may be associated with any quantity of mass. The Schwarzschild radius was named after the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, who calculated this solution for the theory of general relativity in 1916.

  • Karl_Schwarzschild Karl Schwarzschild (German: [kaʁl ˈʃvaʁtsʃɪlt] ; 9 October 1873 – 11 May 1916) was a German physicist and astronomer.