So much has been written about black holes over the past few decades that if all this literature were collected in one place, one suspects that its sheer density could form a black hole of its very own. This is in no way a criticism of the people who write about them, however, as the intrinsic weirdness of these cosmic enigmas captures our fascination as surely as the black holes themselves capture the light and matter upon which they feed. With Gravity’s Engines, the American astronomer Caleb Scharf offers a different take on these objects by explaining how they are closely interlinked with star and galaxy formation, energy conversion and the distribution of matter in the universe.

Although the book is subtitled “The Other Side of Black Holes”, for the most part this is not to be taken literally. You should not expect to read about parallel universes, “white holes”, adventures in relativity or – a favourite of black-hole literature – the “spaghettification” that occurs when an unlucky space traveller approaches a black hole’s event horizon. Instead, Scharf’s attention is drawn to the supermassive black holes that lie at the centre of galaxies – and particularly the bold idea that these objects are responsible for life in the universe.

Scharf worked in X-ray astronomy before he embarked on his present career as an exoplanet researcher at Columbia University in the US, and in the book’s first chapter he returns to his earlier interest. He begins by charting the journey of an X-ray photon from a distant quasar 12 billion light-years away all the way to the Earth-orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which detects it and sends a blip of data to Scharf’s computer screen. Scharf tells the story of the photon’s travels in parallel with a more familiar tale of our solar system’s formation and our own history as a species. The combination of the two makes for an exhilarating ride, one that breathlessly captures the sheer enormity of time and distance (the two being inextricably linked in cosmology) involved in the photon’s journey.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to early black-hole research. The history of such research is surprisingly long, dating back to the mid-18th century, when an English rector and polymath, John Michell, tried to apply Newton’s laws of gravitation to distant stars. A really creative thinker, Michell used the nascent discipline of statistics to show that at least some stars must be orbiting each other – a configuration that allows their mass to be calculated. When Michell embarked upon this research, the age of stellar measurements by telescope had not yet begun, but as Scharf shows, further insights nevertheless led the resourceful Michell to the concept of “dark stars” – gravitational kings of the heavens from which even light could not escape. Pierre-Simon Laplace, working in France, also concluded that “black stars” must exist in the universe, but they would, necessarily, be invisible. How could one possibly observe such a thing?

Scharf shows how black holes act as regulators and galactic batteries

Ultimately, scientific insights from several fields proved crucial to our understanding of black holes. Scharf is surprisingly downbeat about one such insight – the Michelson–Morley experiment of the late 19th century, which he calls a “spectacular failure”. In fact, it should be viewed as a phenomenal success, as it overturned the deeply held view that there is a “luminiferous aether” through which light propagates. Banishing the aether led to more accurate theories of light and its behaviour, which would eventually help us comprehend the extreme environment of black holes. And yet despite this breakthrough (and others by James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein and Karl Schwarzschild), for many years, further observations only revealed further puzzles. Nevertheless, these developments formed the beginning of our current, larger picture.

Later in the book, Scharf turns his gaze towards our own galaxy. Does it harbour a black hole? What about other galaxies? If so, why? Much of the book is devoted to the role that black holes play in large-scale galaxy formation, and whether galaxies or black holes formed first, but even the answers Scharf is able to give seem only to produce more questions. How is it that these black holes can produce energy more efficiently than nuclear fusion? How can an object that fits in the orbit of Neptune affect star formation for an entire galaxy? Why do the photons produced by the cosmic jets that emanate from black holes seem more energetic than they ought to be? By placing the curious nature of these extreme objects within in the context of galaxy formation, Scharf shows how black holes act as regulators and galactic “batteries”. Indeed, his book might have been more appropriately called Galaxies’ Engines.

In the final chapters, Scharf collates what he has previously covered on X-ray and radio astronomy, radiation, quantum physics and relativity to construct an image of the black hole’s role in the creation of life. He also describes some ambitious space projects such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). This three-part spacecraft was designed to “listen out” for gravitational waves using components that are separated by a baseline of 5 million km, but fell victim to NASA budget cuts. It is now being reformulated by the European Space Agency as the New Gravitational-wave Observatory.

Scharf has a pleasing, colloquial style that rarely seems out of place, and many of his analogies work well. One particularly beautiful example is his characterization of the central black hole in the Milky Way galaxy as a monster in a castle surrounded by forests. However, he sometimes uses more analogies than he needs to, and a few of them are a little odd; for example, it may be true that the kinetic energy of a potted plant dropped on the Sun is equivalent to that of 100 billion apples dropped from 1 m on Earth, but I am not sure what we are meant to learn from this. In addition, readers who have a little background in physics and astronomy will probably get more out of it than complete newcomers, as there is a healthy platter of research to feast on in the book, and a helpful set of notes at the back with some suggestions for further reading. Overall, however, Scharf takes care to explain what the questions are and what the results mean, and his weighty choice of subject should not prevent anyone from picking up this book.

• 2012 Allen Lane £20.00/$26.00hb 272pp