Project Gutenberg 2025-06-22 Public domain in the USA. 222 Jeans, James 1877 1946 Jeans, Sir James Hopwood Jeans, James H. (James Hopwood) Jeans, J. H. (James Hopwood) The universe around us Second edition $aCambridge :$bUniversity Press, $c1929, pubdate 1930. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universe_Around_Us deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "The universe around us" by James Jeans is a popular-science astronomy book written in the early 20th century. It presents a clear, nontechnical survey of observational and theoretical astronomy—from the solar system and stars to nebulae, galaxies, cosmogony, and the large-scale structure of the cosmos—framed by the question of humanity’s place in the universe and updated with then-new findings such as Pluto, galactic rotation, and cosmic expansion. The opening of this work recounts how Galileo’s telescope overturned the geocentric worldview (with the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus), traces the cultural resistance and eventual shift in human self-understanding, and explains why astronomy matters—existentially, scientifically, and aesthetically. It sets a vast time-scale perspective (Earth’s age versus the brief span of human and scientific history) and proposes that current astronomy offers only first approximations, like pieces of a jigsaw. Beginning its survey, it outlines the solar system (inner rocky planets, asteroid belt, giant outer planets, and newly found Pluto), questions Bode’s “law,” and sketches planetary conditions and temperatures. It then describes Herschel’s star counts and the biscuit-shaped galactic system, distinguishes planetary, galactic, and extra-galactic (spiral) nebulae, and emphasizes the colossal scale of systems like Andromeda. The text explains how stellar distances were first measured via parallax and builds the “distance ladder” from Earth to light-years, noting photography’s transformative role. It introduces star groups and binaries, uses Newton’s gravitation to show how stellar masses are weighed (and how luminosity varies dramatically with mass), and summarizes spectroscopic and eclipsing binaries. Finally, it introduces variable stars—especially Cepheids—pointing toward the period–luminosity relation that makes them cosmic distance markers. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/universearoundus00jean_0 20241121073806jeans 1929 GB Reading ease score: 52.4 (10th to 12th grade). Somewhat difficult to read. en Astronomy Cosmogony QB Text Category: Science - Physics 833830 2025-07-30T07:49:00.740784 text/html 781687 2025-06-22T19:54:55 text/html 5065769 2025-07-30T07:49:15.675674 application/epub+zip 5074472 2025-07-30T07:49:04.461762 application/epub+zip 557271 2025-07-30T07:49:02.569802 application/epub+zip 6112528 2025-07-30T07:49:22.993654 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 6045244 2025-07-30T07:49:13.980728 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 667813 2025-07-30T07:48:58.628260 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 647945 2025-06-22T19:54:55 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 14215 2025-07-30T07:49:23.174664 application/rdf+xml 18896 2025-07-30T07:49:02.912756 image/jpeg 2475 2025-07-30T07:49:02.735739 image/jpeg 5421877 2025-07-30T07:49:01.056767 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia