How do you explore distant stars, buried water on Mars or the first moments after the Big Bang – without leaving your back garden?

In The Radio Universe, award-winning astrophysicist Emma Chapman takes us on an electrifying voyage through the cosmos using one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, tools in science: the radio wave. With dazzling clarity and humour, Chapman reveals how these invisible messengers glide through space, bounce off planets, tunnel through clouds and slip past galactic dust – carrying secrets of the universe that no other kind of light can uncover.

We follow a single radio wave as it escapes Earth and travels outward – ricocheting off the Moon, tunnelling through Venus’s furnace-thick atmosphere, tracing ancient ice hidden in Mercury’s shadows and diving deep into the swirling arms of the Milky Way. Along the way, we meet black holes that roar louder than stars, pulsars more precise than atomic clocks and galaxies lit by the very first starlight. We explore volcanic pancake planets, death-defying neutron stars, the eerie possibility of alien broadcasts – and the fragile question of our own future in the cosmos.

A celebration of human ingenuity and cosmic curiosity, The Radio Universe reveals that the true frontier of space isn’t ‘out there’ – it’s humming quietly all around us, waiting to be heard.

Author Biography

Emma Chapman is an award-winning radio astronomer based at the University of Nottingham, and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin research fellow. Her first book, First Light, was based on her groundbreaking research into the era of the first stars. She won the 2018 Royal Society Athena Prize for her work to end staff-student sexual harrassment in academia.

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