San Antonio College Library

Orienting us with an insider's tour of our cosmic home, the Milky Way, William Waller and Paul Hodge then take us on a spectacular journey, inviting us to probe the exquisite structures and motions of giant spiral and elliptical galaxies, to witness the transformative dramas of colliding and erupting galaxies, and to pay our respects to the most powerful galaxies of all the quasars.

Through four decades of space exploration and ever-better telescopes, astronomers have searched in vain, unable to find even a single planet orbiting any of the myriad of sunlike stars strewn through the Milky Way. All of this changed in October 1995, when astronomers announced the first planet discovered orbiting another sunlike star. Worlds Unnumbered captures the excitement and explains the significance of these new worlds, with an up-to-the-last-planet...

"Fifty years of intensive searching for other solar systems produced no credible claim for an extrasolar planet. Then, in the last two exciting years, several teams of astronomers around the globe caught the first glimpses of a rich crop of giant, Jupiter-sized gas planets - the first compelling evidence that not only are there others Earth-like planets, but that they may well be more plentiful than ever imagined." "With an insider's perspective,...