“Accidental Astronomy”: A new book explores everything in space that we discovered by chance

Chris Lintott tries to observe everything from asteroids hurtling through the solar system to galaxies far away, and the way the cosmos reveals its secrets is a story he believes deserves an audience.

Luck and scientific missteps are the cornerstones of astronomy. Stories of celebrated geniuses and prize winners are masks, he argues, that hide the more exciting reality of most astronomical discoveries: confusion, asking a new question and relating that information to a new place. In his new book, “Accidental Astronomy,” out earlier this month, Lintott sheds light on what he calls the “science of serendipity” and how these serendipitous moments lead to some of the greatest discoveries in astronomy.

Lintott spoke with Turning back about the new job and the joy of living out his childhood dream and looking up at the sky.

Inverse: Why did you write this book?

Chris Lintott: I grew up with a little telescope that I used to look up at the sky. I remember looking for comets with this little telescope that I bought with my pocket money that I earned selling ice cream on the seafront.

One of my motivations at the time was the desire to make a discovery. I wanted to talk in the book about the kind of processes that I think are hidden when we hear about clever scientists. It’s tempting to think they know what they’re doing. As it turns out, that’s not quite true. Many of the great discoveries we hear about were made by accident rather than by design. And a big part of the fun is when something surprises us.

There’s a sense that the universe is pretty big and vast and scary. I can stand on stage and talk about billions of stars and billions of galaxies and convey the sense that we’re lost on this little world around an ordinary star that’s insignificant on a cosmic scale.

I think if we understand the cosmos by stumbling upon truth and encountering coincidences, then in a way it frees me from the responsibility of caring about all the billions of galaxies. It’s fun to be in a universe where we can be surprised.

Can you give an example of one of these great accidental discoveries?

Luckily, there are a lot of them! That’s the book. One that I thought about a lot was the arrival of an asteroid in the solar system that we called ‘Oumuamua. It was discovered by chance by a survey looking for asteroids that could hit the Earth.

One of the interesting things about the stories in the book is that they often involve scientists from very different backgrounds who work together to establish connections.

‘Oumuamua is a good example. It was discovered by people who built telescopes. People who study near-Earth asteroids and are used to seeing dots.

So you see this object comes from the outer solar system, so you need people who study comets.

But then it turns out that it is not behaving like a comet. Now chemists have to figure out what is happening. Meanwhile, a cosmologist in America has decided that it could be a spaceship. So we might as well ask radio astronomers to listen and see if it is sending back signals. Then we have to think about where it is coming from.

So you need people to make models of the galaxy to figure out what star it might have come from. You also want to know where it’s going. That’s planetary dynamics. You end up talking to anyone who works in the field.

It’s the most natural of all scientific questions: I’ve found something strange. What is it? And then I follow it wherever it leads.