Pillars of Creation

Space exploration has made great strides in recent decades; We owe them, among other things, to space telescopes, instruments placed in space that monitor visible and invisible radiation. The first was the Hubble Space Telescope, which began observations in 1990 and gave scientists a deeper look into the Universe than ever before. Its successor became the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021. Panek describes not only these devices in his readable book, but also teams of scientists and engineers, who are behind them, recounts the events, that preceded their release, their operations and discoveries, that made it possible. It illustrates the story of scientific knowledge: each new discovery sets the boundaries of our knowledge, and other scientists strive to cross those boundaries and establish a new horizon that their successors will in turn want to push forward.