What's Up with Astronomy?

Designed to help students better understand how science works and how it impacts their daily lives, this volume provides readers with an illuminating discussion of how astronomy became a science, the lived experiences and contributions of key astronomers, and how modern scientific theories are questioned and checked.

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Designed to help students better understand how science works and how it impacts their daily lives, What's Up with Astronomy? provides readers with an illuminating discussion of how astronomy became a science, the lived experiences and contributions of key astronomers throughout time, and how modern scientific theories are questioned and checked.

The opening chapter illustrates how Earth's rotation gives us the day, Earth's orbit gives us the year, Earth's tilt gives us the seasons, and the moon's orbit gives us the month—immediately showing students how astronomy influences our everyday lives. Additional chapters cover early discoveries regarding planets, the composition of light, using telescopes, what stars are made of and how they move, what we know about the sun, and the power of stars. Students learn about the life cycles of stars, neutron stars, black holes, the Milky Way, galaxies, cosmology, and planet formation. The final chapter focuses on our search for other signs of life in the universe.

Concise, easy-to-read, and highly engaging, What's Up with Astronomy? is designed to help students develop their innate scientific curiosity and engage in scientific inquiry. It is an exemplary textbook for non-science majors and introductory courses in astronomy.