快猫短视频

LATE one summer night in 1845, the 3rd Earl of Rosse climbed up to an 18-metre-high platform to focus a telescope on a nebula known as M51. At the time, the telescope was the world鈥檚 biggest, and operating it took considerable stamina. But what Rosse saw was worth his effort. The light resolved into a whirlpool 鈥� the first spiral galaxy ever observed.

Rosse鈥檚 resulting drawing is humble and astonishing. The ink smudges lack the grandeur of the Hubble Space Telescope鈥檚 images of M51 (the Whirlpool galaxy), but they were stunningly accurate. It exemplifies astronomy鈥檚 close link to technology: more powerful instruments allow more penetrating insights.

The opportunity for such side-by-side comparison is just one of the pleasures of Universe, a spectacular book with 300 images relating to astronomy. These range from a Lascaux cave painting made in 15,000 BC, where dots may depict the Pleiades, to a photo of Jupiter鈥檚 south pole released by NASA this year. Visual art is also included, from Vincent van Gogh鈥檚 Starry Night to Sarah Sze鈥檚 21st-century Planetarium.

These deliberately disparate images are paired to provoke the viewer. While some pairings are fairly straightforward, others are more playful. For example, the Horsehead nebula is juxtaposed with the Egyptian Temple of Hathor, where animal-headed deities are portrayed against a background of stars.

But these pairings are mere enticements to find other connections: it鈥檚 choose your own adventure, with the whole cosmos to explore. One such tour offers myriad views of how we make sense of the universe, revealing the brilliance and the blind spots of conjecture. The brilliance is strikingly illustrated in a 1659 diagram by the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, drawn for a book deducing that Saturn must be encircled with rings. At the time, Galileo contended that the rings were attached to the planet.

鈥淭he most powerful way of becoming Copernican has been to discover ever more stars and planets like ours鈥�

Conjectural blind spots, however, show up in a drawing illustrating scholar Martianus Capella鈥檚 geo-heliocentric model of the universe. In the 5th century, Capella cleverly marshalled contemporary observations in support of the prevailing world view. His drawing is a powerful evocation of confirmation bias.

Both graphics hold more than historical interest. Together they provide important context for understanding another remarkable image in Universe: a still from the Millennium Simulation of 2005, in which the Virgo Consortium extrapolated the distribution of dark matter across the cosmos. It鈥檚 cutting-edge science, deserving both admiration and scepticism.

Another thematic course begins with a simple, yet iconic diagram of the heliocentric universe from Nicolaus Copernicus鈥檚 1543 book, De Revolutionibus, and reveals our ongoing struggle to absorb the implications of the Copernican revolution. One big hurdle has been to grasp our unexceptional place in the vastness of space. Science and art have provided an impressive range of visual aids. For instance, Universe includes an 1851 educational chart in which the relative distance of the planets from the sun was shown in terms of the time a cannonball would take to hit them. And in 2011, artist Mishka Henner brilliantly presented the solar system in a 6000-page book, where each leaf represents a million kilometres. Most pages are blank.

And yet the most powerful way to become Copernican has been to look ever further into the cosmos and discover ever more stars and planets like ours. Images of spiral galaxies hold a special place in this gaze, because they have the same structure as the Milky Way. From Rosse鈥檚 sketch to the Hubble images, peering at the Whirlpool we see ourselves from afar 鈥� and recognise that beings from M51 may be taking the same picture.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淧eering into the Whirlpool鈥�