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* Abraham 'Avi' Loeb - Interstellar and other works (6 books, 400+ papers)
ABRAHAM "AVI" LOEB (b. 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. He is currently the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, having been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011–2020) and founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (since 2016).
Loeb has published on a broad range of research areas in astrophysics and cosmology, including the first stars, the epoch of reionization, the formation and evolution of massive black holes, gravitational lensing by planets, the future state of extragalactic astronomy, tidal disruption of stars, and imaging black hole silhouettes. He has authored a number of important textbooks on some of the most exciting frontiers in astrophysics today, including HOW DID THE FIRST STARS AND GALAXIES FORM? (2010), a concise introduction to cosmology and how light first emerged in the universe, and THE FIRST GALAXIES IN THE UNIVERSE (2013), co-written with Steven Furlanetto.
Loeb's public profile changed with the arrival in the solar system, in 2017, of a comet called 'Oumuamua with an unusually elongated shape. As his colleagues argued about whether it was or was not a giant shard of hydrogen ice, Loeb offered a more exotic hypothesis: that 'Oumuamua was most likely to be a craft "designed, built and launched by an extraterrestrial intelligence." This bold suggestion was outlined in this bestselling book EXTRATERRESTRIAL: THE FIRST SIGN OF INTELLIGENT LIFE BEYOND EARTH (2021).
In LIFE IN THE COSMOS (2021), Loeb and Manasvi Lingam offer a thorough overview of the burgeoning field of astrobiology and tackle three areas of interest in hunting for alien life: the pathways by which life originates and evolves; planetary and stellar factors that affect the habitability of worlds, with an eye on the biomarkers that may reveal the presence of microbial life; and finally, the detection of technological signals that could be indicative of intelligence.
In public interviews and private communications with reporters and academic colleagues, Loeb has become more vocal about the prospects of proving the existence of alien life. His most recent book, INTERSTELLAR: THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE AND OUR FUTURE IN THE STARS (2023), reimagines the idea of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Dismantling our science-fiction fueled visions of a human and alien life encounter, Loeb provides a realistic and practical blueprint for how such an interaction might actually occur, resetting our cultural understanding and expectation of what it means to identify an extraterrestrial object.
In addition to more than 400 research papers and other contributions, the following books are in ePub and/or PDF format as noted:
* Extraterrestrial (Mariner, 2021) – ePub
* First Galaxies in the Universe [with S. Furlanetto] (Princeton, 2013) – PDF
* First Light in the Universe (Springer, 2008) – PDF
* How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? (Princeton, 2010) – PDF
* Interstellar (HarperCollins, 2023) – ePub
* Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures (Harvard, 2021) – ePub + PDF
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