Excerpt from Chapter One, "Mysteries of the Universe"

Objects Strange and Wonderful, Page 5 of 5

To date, the evidence for actual black holes is indirect, but at least six may have been found by analyzing the effects of their massive gravitational fields. Invisible sources of X rays that have been located near double-star systems, for example, are perhaps produced when the gases from a visible star are sucked with tremendous force into its dark twin and then heated and compressed enough to become X rays.

There are other odd ducks in the sky. As diverse signals speed back and forth over vast distances, then are caught and fixed and interpreted on plates and slides and paper, celestial reality outstrips previous flights of human imagination. Far, far off, first discerned by infrared wave techniques in 1963, are the most luminous and most distant objects of the known universe -- the faint blue quasars, or quasi-stellar objects. They are apparently racing away from us at something like 80 per cent of the speed of light -- and they are already about eight billions of light years in the distance. To be even faintly visible from this perspective, they must be as bright as a hundred galaxies put together. No one yet knows what they are.

Even in the relatively small portion of sky each of us can see for ourselves in the Great American Desert, we are unconsciously traveling in time with every glance. The light of a star in the cowl of heaven may shine there billions of years after it left its source, but the star itself may long be dead. We gaze across a sea of stars that exist or have existed light-years and eternities apart from one another.

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Foreword by Charles Osgood

Introduction by Charles Kuralt