Overview

This history of asteroids explains how ideas about asteroids have evolved and provides insights into the evolution of scientific ideas. The author describes how such phenomena as the Moon's craters and dinosaur extinction were gradually, and by some scientists grudgingly, accepted as the results of asteroid impacts. He tells how a band of icy asteroids rimming the solar system, first proposed as a theory in the 1940s, was ignored for more than 40 years until renewed interest and technological breakthroughs confirmed the existence of the Kuiper Belt. Covering all aspects of asteroid investigation, Peebles also chronicles the discovery of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet with 22 nuclei that crashed into Jupiter in 1994, releasing many times the energy of the world's nuclear arsenal.

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9781560989820

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Asteroids: A History includes an astonishing number of facts about the discovery, the naming and fate of the stepchildren of the solar system.... Peebles provides an informative discussion of the pivotal role played by technology in the discovery of smaller and smaller members of this chaotic family. Astronomy Peebles puts the latest developments in asteroid science in their proper place in a history that dates back to Kepler's inspired guess at locating the asteroid belt.... In recounting controversies sparked by asteroid research, Peebles transports readers far beyond Jupiter and then back again to a huge crater in Arizona.... Peopling his real-life chronicle with unpredictable personalities and punctuating it with feats of intellectual wizardry, Peebles leaves mere science fiction behind. Booklist

Asteroids: A History includes an astonishing numbero f facts about the discovery, the naming and the fate of the stepchildren of the solar system... Peebles provides an informative discussion of the pivotal role played by technology in the discovery of smaller and smaller members of this chaotic family. Astronomy In recounting controversies sparked by asteroid research, Peebles transports readers far beyond Jupiter and then back again, to a huge crater in northern Arizona... Peopling his real-life chronicle with unpredictable personalities and punctuating it with feats of intellectual wizardry, Peebles leaves mere science fiction far behind. Booklist

Author Information

Curtis Peebles has published ten books and more than forty articles. He is the author of Watch the Skies: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (1994) and coauthor of Flying Without Wings (1999), both published by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

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