Skip to main content

Rebel Star - Colin Stuart ****

It would only be fair to expect that we knew everything there is to know about our friendly neighbourhood star, the Sun. After all, without it we certainly wouldn't be here, it's extremely close in astronomical turns and it has been studied for millennia. Yet, as Colin Stuart reveals, there's plenty we still don't know - and of the bits we do apparently know, I was amazed how much was new to me.

I suspect that solar missions and research just don't get the same level of media coverage as, say, missions to Mars with the potential for long-term manned exploration. We are, after all, never going to send people to the Sun. But there are some great stories about attempts to find out more about what is, inevitably, an inhospitable environment. So, for example, Stuart tells the fascinating tale of the Solor and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission. Launched at the end of 1995, a human error turned the satellite into a $1 billion piece of space junk... or so it seemed. The efforts to get it back going and the final outcome make great reading.

The first part of the book fills in the history of our understanding of the Sun and how it works, while more of the rest covers areas where research is still current and our understanding still remains partial. A lot of this part concentrates on what's going on in the Sun's outer layers and the solar wind and coronal mass ejections that are propelled out from it, sometimes in our direction, which has can have a potentially dire impact on a world dependent on electronics and satellites.

I learned a lot here, and Stuart's enthusiasm is clear. If I have a negative it's that this enthusiasm perhaps carries him away sometimes to give us rather more detail on some of the more abstruse aspects of the complex electromagnetic phenomena that shape sunspots, produce solar flares and more. Similarly, although the likes of Alfven waves and magnetohydrodynamics are essential in getting an understanding what's going on we get, perhaps, a little too much detail for a book aimed at a general audience.

However, if things do get a little over-detailed sometimes, we're soon back to finding out about new and interesting discoveries. Stuart starts most chapters with a scene-setting narrative and throughout the book is packed with information and delights.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more