How to Die in Space

A brilliant and breathtakingly vivid tour of the universe, describing the physics of the dangerous, the deadly, and the scary in the cosmos.

So you’ve fallen in love with space and now you want to see it for yourself, huh? You want to witness the birth of a star, or visit the black hole at the center of our galaxy? You want to know if there are aliens out there, or how to travel through a wormhole? You want the wonders of the universe revealed before your very eyes?

Well stop, because all that will probably kill you.

From mundane comets in our solar backyard to exotic remnants of the Big Bang, from dying stars to young galaxies, the universe may be beautiful, but it’s treacherous. Through metaphors and straightforward language, it breathes life into astrophysics, unveiling how particles and forces and fields interplay to create the drama in the heavens above us.

Paul Sutter, PhD, is the is the author of Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence. He spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics as the Postdoctoral Fellow in Next-Generation Cosmic Probes and currently is a Visiting Scholar at Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics in Columbus, Ohio, where he hosts the popular podcast “Ask a Spaceman!”