| Introduction: Informed Wonder | p. 9 |
| The Big Bang of Dispatches | p. 19 |
| Let There Be Light | p. 24 |
| New Vistas Open for Earthbound Astronomers | p. 25 |
| What Else Lurks Out There? | p. 32 |
| The New X-ray View of Galaxies | p. 37 |
| Observatory for Twenty-first Century Takes Shape | p. 41 |
| Pictures of the Infant Universe | p. 47 |
| Travels in the Solar System | p. 51 |
| Apollo and the Moon's Violent Birth | p. 52 |
| Water on the Moon? | p. 57 |
| Venus's Face Offers Hints of Cataclysm | p. 60 |
| The Comet's Gift: Hints of How Earth Came to Life | p. 64 |
| Magnetic Fields on Distant Moons Hint at Hidden Life | p. 69 |
| Fire, Water, and, Maybe, Life in Jupiter's Realm | p. 72 |
| The Once and Future Martians | p. 77 |
| Clues in Meteorite Seem to Show Signs of Life on Mars Long Ago | p. 78 |
| On Mars, Life's Getting Tougher (If Not Impossible) | p. 82 |
| Spacecraft to Land on the Planet of Dreams | p. 85 |
| The Floods of Mars | p. 88 |
| A "Bonus" from Mars | p. 91 |
| Highs and Lows of Mars | p. 94 |
| New Worlds | p. 97 |
| A Nursery of New Planets | p. 98 |
| Two Sightings of Planet Orbiting a Sunlike Star | p. 101 |
| More Discoveries of Extrasolar Planets | p. 103 |
| In a Golden Age of Discovery, Faraway Worlds Beckon | p. 106 |
| A Disk of Dust Holds a Clue to Birth of Planets | p. 116 |
| Search for New Planets Yields Confusion | p. 118 |
| At Long Last, a New Family of Planets | p. 124 |
| The Birth and Death of Stars | p. 128 |
| Rare Glimpse of a New Star Aborning | p. 129 |
| New Look at Apocalypse: Dying Sun Will Boil Seas and Leave Orbiting Cinder | p. 133 |
| The Spectacular Shudders of Dying Stars | p. 138 |
| Some Strange and Awesome Things | p. 142 |
| Space Telescope Confirms Theory of Black Holes | p. 143 |
| A Black Hole's Awful Table Manners | p. 146 |
| Enormous Plume of Antimatter Alters View of the Milky Way | p. 150 |
| Astronomers Detect Explosion Second Only to Big Bang | p. 153 |
| Astronomers Confirm the Existence of Failed Stars | p. 156 |
| A New Category of Brown Dwarfs | p. 159 |
| An Enormous Surge of Stellar Radiation | p. 161 |
| In Cosmic Blasts, Clues to Black Holes | p. 164 |
| Mystery of the Missing Mass | p. 170 |
| Physicists Step Up Exotic Search for the Universe's Missing Mass | p. 171 |
| Mass Found in Elusive Neutrino | p. 177 |
| Astronomers Glimpse Galaxies Aborning | p. 182 |
| The Universe as Telescope | p. 187 |
| Galaxies' Vastness Surprises Scientists | p. 193 |
| Cosmology Comes of Age | p. 198 |
| Sizing Up the Cosmos: An Astronomer's Quest | p. 200 |
| Profound Insight on How Time Began | p. 206 |
| In the Glow of Cosmic Discovery, a Physicist Ponders God and Fame | p. 209 |
| Scientists, Once Starry-Eyed, Get Clearer View of Universe | p. 213 |
| A Young or Old Universe? | p. 218 |
| Universe's Age Poses New Cosmic Puzzle | p. 219 |
| Einstein's Blunder as Fix for New Crisis | p. 222 |
| Conflicting Answers for the Age of the Universe | p. 227 |
| The Importance of the Number 70 | p. 232 |
| A Younger Age, Perhaps? | p. 235 |
| Fate of the Universe | p. 238 |
| Wary Astronomers Ponder an Accelerating Universe | p. 239 |
| In the Light of Dying Stars, Astronomers See Intimations of Cosmic Immortality | p. 243 |
| "Missing Energy" of the Universe | p. 252 |
| At the Other End of "Big Bang" May Simply Be a Big Sputter | p. 255 |
| Looking and Listening for ET | p. 259 |
| Widening the Hunt for Alien Life | p. 260 |
| In Search of Star Dust and Clues to Life | p. 264 |
| Scanning the Heavens for Signs of Life | p. 268 |
| From the Big Bang to a Theory of Everything | p. 274 |
| A Primordial Form of Matter | p. 275 |
| New Findings Help Balance the Cosmological Books | p. 278 |
| Sailing a Wheelchair to the End of Time | p. 285 |
| Almost in Awe, Physicists Ponder "Ultimate" Theory | p. 292 |
| Cosmic Views from 2001 | p. 299 |
| New View of a Nursery of Stars | p. 300 |
| Two More Planetary Systems | p. 304 |
| In Big Bang's Echoes, Clues to the Cosmos | p. 307 |
| With Little Evidence, String Theory Gains Influence | p. 312 |
| A Test of Einstein's Negative Gravity | p. 315 |
| Before the Big Bang, There Was ... What? | p. 317 |
| Index | p. 325 |
| About the Authors | p. 343 |
| Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved. |
