The book "The Astonishing Universe" recounts the golden age of thrilling discoveries that literally turned astrophysics and cosmology upside down: unexpected discoveries of rapidly spinning pulsars, enigmatic black holes, red giants and white dwarfs, dark matter and dark energy, and the observation of the distribution of galaxies in a spider-web-like cosmic structure with clusters, superclusters, filaments, etc.

It also describes the paradoxically accelerating expansion of the Universe, the pervasive cosmic microwave background radiation, the gravitational waves detected from neutron star and black hole mergers, the possible existence of multiverses, and more.

The book is aimed at a thoughtful general audience that may not have the technical knowledge, and is therefore primarily written in a casual manner, without mathematics and difficult advanced concepts, so that everything is explained simply and understandably.