Sir Brian, along with Ward-Thompson and Mtsavanio, launched the book at an event in Notting Hill, London in mid-November, presenting a lecture on some of the galaxies featured in the book and introducing some of Mtsavanio’s three-dimensional images.
“We wrote a book called Cosmic Clouds, bringing to life the clouds of dust and gas in our own galaxy,” Sir Brian told the BBC ahead of the launch. “And that’s not something that anyone except JP can do… Having done that, where do we go next? Well, we go outside the Milky Way, we go into other galaxies, we look at all the galaxies in the universe, and we’ve included one of the world’s leading experts in galaxy evolution, who is sitting right next to you.”
JP MtsivanyoWard-Thompson laughs: “I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve been studying them for 40 years. I mentioned that one of the galaxies in the book was my PhD thesis, and I’ve been looking at it for 40 years.
“Part of the beauty of the book is that I’m able to tell the story of how our knowledge has developed during those 40 years,” continues Ward-Thompson, who lectures in physics and astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, in the north of England. “An example, when I was a student, we were taught that we lived in a ‘normal’ spiral galaxy, as you are imagining it now, with spiral arms radiating from the center.”
<a href