- The discovery of spectroscopy and the birth of astrophysics
- A milestone in the history of astronomy – captivatingly told
- The key to understanding the universe
How do we actually know what stars are made of? Just over 200 years ago, Joseph Fraunhofer discovered dark lines in the "rainbow" of the sun. This marked the birth of astrophysics, as the spectra of stars revealed a new, aesthetically impressive and yet completely alien landscape in the sky. The dark lines in the coloured spectra of the sun and stars are a fingerprint of the substances they are made of. This turned the universe into a laboratory: by studying the light from stars, we can draw conclusions about their composition and many other properties.
Spectroscopy has radically changed our simple image of the night sky as a collection of points of light – and revealed incredible secrets of the cosmos.
Table of contents:
- Foreword
- The sky as a laboratory – the dawn of a new science
- Fraunhofer's dark lines – an unsolvable but useful puzzle
- The secret code of the stars – on the sidelines of history
- The solution to the mystery – the universe is physics and chemistry
- New science makes a career – the sky in the laboratory of astrophysics
The author, Dr. Jürgen Teichmann, is Professor of History of Natural Sciences at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
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