The Intimate Universe

Book excerpt: The scale of the cosmos can be baffling, with distances so vast and timescales to long that it's easy to dismiss them as being completely divorced from our everyday life. But in this new book Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, shows you the myriad ways we are intrinsically connected to the rest of the universe and how everything on Earth - from the ground beneath our feet to the technology in our pockets - has origins in space. Discover how rocks from space reveal what conditions are like at our planet's core, how the desolate surface of the moon holds ancient clues to Earth's earliest life forms, and how buried treasure in the Nile reveals the watery past of Mars. Discover how the atoms of your own body were forged in the heart of a star, how you can see the echo of creation on your TV, and the ways in which technology developed for observing the most far-flung corners of space is now used to diagnose potentially fatal human diseases. The Intimate Universe is a curated tour of the most fascinating phenomena and discoveries in astronomy, revealing how we are inextricably, inspirationally linked to the cosmos.