The Race to the Big Bang - (The Stardust Mystery Project) by Peter Solomon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In The Race to the Big Bang illustrated science adventure book, the sequel to The Stardust Mystery, the Cosmic Kids return from a wonderful trip to the moon only to discover their lives drastically altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. They find relief by inventing new pandemic pastimes. The best pastime of all is a new contest called The Race to the Big Bang with a grand prize of $1 million in cash and $1 million in college scholarships. The four Cosmic Kids and coach Grandpa form a new team, the Cosmic Explorers, with two new coaches and their friends and last year's contest winners Jackson and Johari. Neddy invites her friend Richie to join them too. They are going to compete in a new series of Virtual World adventures and believe their team's previous success in using the Virtual World to time travel will give them a huge advantage.

As they time travel to the Big Bang, they discover unusual things on Earth, in the solar system, and in the universe. They help prove the Big Bang theory by measuring the distance to a nearby galaxy and prove Albert Einstein's Twin Paradox with Lizzy's long solo round trip voyage to our closest star. After four years of travel, Lizzy returns to discover her younger sister Neddy is now her older sister. Neddy loves that.

The Cosmic Explorers turn a planet they have found seven billion years ago into their space station by adding the events that made Planet Earth habitable. They add water by redirecting comets to hit their planet, they create an oxygen atmosphere using cyanobacteria brought from Earth, and they plant vegetation for food from seeds also from Earth.

Their brilliant ideas have some unintended consequences that are both wonderful and awful. Finally, they end their adventure by creating videos to help other kids understand how the Covid-19 virus infects people and how a vaccine can keep everyone safe. With this new project, they learn how the cells in their bodies are factories that can fabricate substances based on pieces of genetic codes.