First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

Astrophysicist Chapman debuts with a spirited history of the early universe when stars “roared to life.” Her focus is on the period “from 380,000 years after the Big Bang to about 1 billion years after it,” known as the dark ages because of how little is known about it. Chapman begins by explaining light and the electromagnetic spectrum, and from there, surveys the first stars in the universe, Population III stars. The standard hypothesis, she explains, is that the stars were formed by gravity, combustion, and nuclear fusion acting upon clouds of gas. Chapman brings things up to the present with an outline of the ways astronomers are searching for data in the stars with huge arrays of terrestrial radio telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Chapman’s tone is conversational, and she has a knack for breaking down complex scientific material (the dark ages’ “missing cosmological data is equivalent to missing everything from the moment of conception to the first day of school”), though she can go on distracting tangents (as with a digression on King Tut’s tomb as a lead-in to “stellar archaeology”). Nonetheless, those looking for an introduction to stellar evolution will find much here to dig into. (Feb.)