The First Pages: Galaxies

THE FIRST PAGES

When Galaxies were Born
by Richard Ellis

Galaxies
by Or Graur

24 November 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch series. On 26 November 2025, in a double book launch, renowned astrophysicists, Richard Ellis and Or Graur, will present their books on galaxies. Ellis’s book, When Galaxies Were Born: The Quest for Cosmic Dawn is a semi-autobiographical account of the progress over his career in studying distant galaxies and tracing cosmic history. Or Graur, in his book Galaxies, offers a brief and fascinating overview of the history, physics, and astrophysical uses of galaxies, starting with the history of the last two thousand years of galaxy studies.

When Galaxies were Born
by Richard Ellis

Out into Space
We live in a time full of remarkable astronomical discoveries. Scarcely a week goes by without media reports of some interesting new celestial object, be it an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star, an object of unknown origin arriving in the solar system or, as discussed in this book, the most distant known galaxy seen as it would have appeared when its light first set out for Earth billions of years ago. The universe fascinates many of us, and increasingly so as the pace of discovery accelerates. Unlike some other scientific disciplines, which require the understanding of difficult concepts with unfamiliar terminologies, astronomy has the advantage that every one can understand the fascination of exploring outer space and discovering what’s out there. Who hasn’t, at one time or another, pondered such fundamental questions as, are we alone in the universe? Where did the world around us and the worlds beyond us come from? What does the future hold for the universe and our place within it? And what can we learn from gazing billions of years into its past?

My fascination with astronomy dates from childhood. When I was 6 years old, I visited the public library in the small coastal town of Colwyn Bay in North Wales, where I was born and grew up. One day I found a book in the children’s section that set me on a career path of five decades as a professional astronomer. Exactly why I picked up this book is unclear to me now. It was a little blue book entitled Out into Space, with no striking illustrations on its cover or inside. It describes the fictional adventures of a young brother and sister who go to stay with their…

When Galaxies were Born was published by Princeton University Press in November 2022.

Galaxies
by Or Graur

There I was, driving my twin daughters to a matinee showing of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 in our bright-red Ford Galaxy. I was listening to a recording of Douglas Adams’s original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show on my Samsung Galaxy S7 mobile phone. One girl was daintily chewing a Galaxy chocolate bar while the other wolfed down a Milky Way bar. It suddenly occurred to me that, even though the word “galaxy” had become so common as to be used for everything from cars to phones to chocolate bars, most people probably did not know what it meant.

I had been a professional astrophysicist for over a decade, yet I too had never wondered where the word “galaxy” came from or why ours was called the Milky Way. Once I had asked those first questions, I started wondering what else I still had to learn about galaxies. This book is the result.

Galaxies was published by The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series in August 2024.

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RICHARD ELLIS is Professor of Astrophysics at UCL. A Welshman by birth, he was an undergraduate at UCL and obtained his PhD at Oxford. He has held professorial positions at Durham, Cambridge and Oxford universities and spent 16 years at the California Institute of Technology, where he was Director of the Palomar Observatory. Richard is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian and US National Academies of Science and was awarded the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2023 for his research achievements in cosmology and galaxy evolution. In 2011, he won the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (its highest honour).

OR GRAUR is Professor of Astrophysics at University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. He studies how stars explode as supernovae or get torn apart by supermassive black holes. He is also interested in the multicultural mythology of the Milky Way. Galaxies is his second book with MIT Press, following the publication of Supernova in 2022.

On 26 November 2025 Richard Ellis and Or Graur will launch their books, When Galaxies were Born and Galaxies, respectively, at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead image by Free Nature Stock via Unsplash.