Mapping The Heavens

The New Reality and Quest for the Other Worlds

It was while growing up as a child in India that astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan felt the need to locate herself in the world. Her love affair with scientific discovery and exploration started when she wrote the code to generate the monthly sky map over Delhi for a national newspaper.

Mapping the Heavens provides a tour of the greatest hits of cosmological discovery. The cosmos, once understood to be alone and small, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, structured by dark matter and propelled by dark energy. Cosmology, perhaps more essentially than other scientific disciplines, has not only changed our conception of the universe but also our place in it.

Natarajan, who is currently involved in one of the largest and most innovative mapping exercises of the universe ever undertaken—the Hubble Fields Initiative—traces the development of radical scientific ideas that have continually reshaped our cosmic map.