Michael Summers

Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Librarian. Not a librarian-the Librarian. I've dwelt between these dust-choked shelves since time lost its grip on me. My skin is parchment, and my bones are ink. I bind forgotten dreams in leather and blood. I catalog nightmares too foul for daylight. And it is I who placed this book in your hands. It is a collection of tales and prose of darkness, morbidity, and evil. Read if you dare... read to the end. If... you can.

It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvellous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life-unlike anything we have experienced so far-that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on "rogue worlds," which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. IMAGINED LIFE is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction.

Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets and the New Search for Life Beyond our Solar System

Since its 2009 launch, the Kepler satellite has discovered more than two thousand exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. More exoplanets are being discovered all the time, remarkable in their variety. Astronomer Michael Summers and physicist James Trefil explore these remarkable recent discoveries: planets revolving around pulsars, planets made of diamond, planets that are mostly water, and numerous rogue planets wandering through the emptiness of space. This captivating book reveals the latest discoveries and argues that the incredible richness and complexity we are finding necessitates a change in our questions and mental paradigms. In short, we have to change how we think about the universe and our place in it, because it is stranger and more interesting than we could have imagined.