IT could be his most demanding composition yet. Brian May, the guitarist with the rock group Queen, has returned to his first love of astronomy with plans for a book on “the complete history of the universe”.

He is working with Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, and Chris Lintott, Moore’s co-presenter on the BBC’s The Sky at Night, to write a cutting-edge account of the universe from birth to a slow death.

May, 58, who abandoned his astronomy PhD when Queen hit the charts in the mid-1970s, has named the book Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, after the Big Bang from which the universe is thought to have originated.

Although the work is targeted at lay readers, the authors have decided it must incorporate the latest research and theories on the evolution of the universe.

It will also include photographs taken by May from the elaborate observatory he has built in the garden of his Surrey mansion.

“Brian is still an astronomer at heart,” said Lintott. “When the three of us meet for writing sessions he is the harshest judge of the science and the way we explain it. He is very rigorous.”

May was studying for his doctorate at Imperial College London when Queen, which he helped co-found with Freddie Mercury in the early 1970s, hit the charts with songs such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Killer Queen.

He gave up writing his PhD thesis, instead penning rock classics such as We Will Rock You, Fat-Bottomed Girls and Tie Your Mother Down. It was his guitar playing along with Mercury’s vocals that gave Queen its distinctive sound.

Within a few years he and Mercury, along with Roger Taylor and John Deacon, the other band members, had achieved global fame. Mercury died in 1991 from Aids but May has kept the band’s name going, promoting We Will Rock You, the hit West End musical in 2002, and touring with Taylor.

May is now making it clear that behind the facade of a rock demi-god there always lay a keen astronomer awaiting the chance to return to his unfinished thesis on the way light reflects from interplanetary dust particles.

He appears to have that chance. While working on the book, May has told senior astrophysicists he wants to complete his thesis and has persuaded them to assess it.

A major factor in that success was a research paper he published in 1974, entitled An Investigation of the Motion of Zodiacal Dust Particles, which remains a widely cited work.

In the book May, Moore and Lintott firmly fix the date of the Big Bang — and hence the age of the universe — at 13.7 billion years. From there they use the latest research and observations to trace the evolution of the first stars and galaxies.

Then they focus on the origins of the solar system and the latest theories on how planets ranging from tiny Mercury, the hot rocky body closest to the sun, to giants like Jupiter and Uranus, composed of swirling gases, might have evolved from primitive balls of cosmic dust.

The three did not agree on everything. Lintott describes wrangling for hours over certain sections and sometimes battling over single sentences — such as those describing the chances of life being found elsewhere in the universe.

May, a sceptic, found himself opposed by Moore, who has long pointed to the sheer number of stars and the recent discoveries that many have planets as powerful evidence that life must exist elsewhere in the universe.

Such disagreements ended in consensus, however. “Brian is a fine astronomer,” said Moore. “He is best known for his musical interests. Those tunes are not to my taste, but he has taken some very good pictures of Venus passing across the face of the sun.”

In the past May, who was not available for interview, has been lampooned for his supposedly dour onstage appearance and bleak outlook on life and has told interviewers that he suffered badly from depression in the late 1980s.

Some suggest it could be that same bleak outlook which led May and his co-authors towards their conclusions about the fate of the universe.

They predict that it will undergo a long slow death, expanding for ever until even the stars run out of energy and, one by one, die.

As May himself once said in an interview — and may have forgotten: “Astronomy’s much more fun when you’re not an astronomer.”

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