Jen’s Reviews > You Are Here: A User's Guide to the Universe > Status Update

Waffling between 4 and 5 stars. It's at least a 4.5. I was able to follow it till the last two appendices. Then my little head went "pop"! Great little book though. I enjoyed it. Learned quite a bit too. When you know very little like I do, every new non-fiction book is a brand new world! Lol.

"Born with a terrible disability- two X chromosomes, instead of an X and a Y: yes, she was female- Henrietta Swan was unable to get a job in science except as a lowly 'computer'. ... "A person employed to do long tedious calculations." ... If Leavitt had been a man ... And done her work under "astronomer" she would certainly have won a Nobel Prize."

Looking for a "grand unification theory" that combined Einstein's theory of gravitation with the theory of anything else. "...more than a generation later they're still sitting on the pot, purple in the face, grunting and straining. Nothing but gas has yet been produced." Omg, I'm crying I'm laughing so hard.

"...the majority of cosmologists now think that some version of inflation is probably, to everyone's great surprise, true. Because of this, you are about to get a very bad headache." Lol!

Rho Cassiopeiae is several hundred times the diameter of the sun and five million times as bright. It's a hypergiant. And apparently we're close (relatively) to the edge of our galaxy. Go figure.

Didn't realize that star brightness differed from our sun's. Rigel Orionis, Orion's left foot is about 800-900 light years away, is 60 times the diameter of our sun and 60,000 times as bright. Take THAT vampires! Mwah ha ha ha ha!!

What causes a comet to orbit? Why is it directed and not random like an asteroid? Or are asteroids not random? Gah, this book and the research rabbit holes it's going to take me down!

Great, now I'm curious how hyper giant stars form. If they burn through their fuel so quickly, how long is their "life"? What causes something that big to come into being?

"The sun contains almost 99.9% of all the mass in the solar system. If the solar system is a 500-sheet ream of copier paper, the sun accounts for 499 1/4 sheets, Jupiter is half a sheet, and everything else- all the other planets, asteroids and comets- are the remaining quarter of a sheet."

"...ancient volcanoes belched oxygen into the atmosphere and later on, blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria) belched even more of it. Not everyone whooped for joy: oxygen ... drove Earth's earliest inhabitants, the bacteria-like Archaea, deep underground. To the Archaea, our world must look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, with the entire surface of the planet irretrievably poisoned."