The Edge of Infinity by Fulvio Melia, Cambridge University Press, £18.95, ISBN 0521814057 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
HOW can a region of space no bigger than the solar system shine as brightly as 10 trillion suns? This was the pressing question facing astronomers after Martin Schmidt and Cyril Hazard discovered quasars in 1963. The only possibility – at least within the bounds of known science – was that matter is heated to incandescence as it spirals down into a black hole with a mass of a billion or so suns.
For several decades it was possible to think of such “supermassive” black…
