Fifteen Nights Above the Earth

The story of how the universe began, told gently, one night at a time.

Each chapter is one night. It begins with a working day of Noor, an astronaut on a six-month stay high above the Earth: two hours on a treadmill with straps, a cargo ship caught with a robotic arm, a noise on a radio link, a practice drill, a quiet night watch. Something in her day leads to a question, and the question leads to the night's story: light as a messenger from the past, galaxies moving apart, the oldest light in the sky, the first minutes, the first stars, how galaxies grew, how stars made the atoms of our bodies, and the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Along the way, the book tells briefly how people found these things out, often while they were simply doing their jobs. Every chapter ends with a few common misunderstandings about the universe or about life in space, explained kindly and clearly, and the book says plainly what is still unknown.

Written in calm, plain language for working adults with no science background, each chapter takes about twenty minutes to read.