One of the pleasures of the storybook is being able to open it anywhere to let yourself be carried away in a new story: here a knight comes to the rescue of a princess, further away stands a dragon, there a cat struggles boot. Surprisingly, the sky also reads like a series of tales. Thus, by studying the Andromeda nebula – an Ethiopian princess saved from a terrible sea monster by Perseus – the American astronomer Edwin Hubble ended up understanding, in the 1920s, that the said nebula was in reality another galaxy and that the Universe had gigantic proportions; thus, two centuries earlier, the Briton James Bradley gave the first direct proof of the revolution of the Earth around the Sun thanks to the star Gamma of the constellation of the… Dragon; thus there existed for several decades a cat in the sky, asterism invented by the French Jérôme de Lalande but which did not pass to posterity.
Etoiles is conceived as a book of tales, in which the reader will peck according to his fancy, in no particular order. Its author, the Austrian astronomer and popularizer Florian Freistetter, considers that“A story of the Universe also tells something about us humans. Since our species was born, the sky has exerted an irresistible fascination on us. The stars have influenced our culture, our thinking, and made us who we are today ”. Through a hundred stars and as many stories, it is therefore a question of talking about the stars and those who scrutinize them.
Light on the forgotten
There are big names and famous stages of the scientific saga. The star 72 Tauri makes it possible to evoke Albert Einstein, because his observation during a total solar eclipse in 1919 was the first confirmation of his theory of general relativity. The modest 51 star in the constellation Pegasus, for its part, became a world star in 1995 when Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first extrasolar planet in orbit around it.
But Florian Freistetter’s book also brings to light the forgotten of astronomy, and in particular the forgotten, researchers whose contribution was undeniable but underestimated precisely because they were women in a very masculine field. The name of Herschel is famous for the discovery of Uranus by William, but his sister Caroline was not to be outdone, a great observer of the sky, who detected several comets and produced one of the best stellar catalogs of her time. Williamina Fleming and Annie Jump Cannon sorted the stars according to their heat and spectral type. Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered the peculiarities of the Cepheids, stars which have since served as beacons for astronomers. Jocelyn Bell highlighted the first pulsar, but the Nobel Prize for this discovery went… to her thesis supervisor. Tales don’t always end well.
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