15 Million Degrees: A Journey to the Centre of the Sun by Professor Lucie Green
November 2019
I bought this paperback, published in 2017, at a book sale for only $7. It comes in at just over 270 pages and has lots of colour photos and quite a few black and white diagrams to illustrate the discussion.
The Sun: 110 times wider than Earth; 15 million degrees at its core; an atmosphere so huge that Earth is actually within it.
Light takes eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the Sun. But its journey within the Sun takes hundreds of thousands of years. What is going on in there? What are light and heat? How does the Sun produce them and how on earth did scientists discover this?
The book details the latest research/findings in solar physics and introduces readers to the groundbreaking scientists, including the author, who pieced this extraordinary story together. It is written for the layman and the various scientific bits and pieces are well explained in simple terms. The author, a solar physicist herself, writes with passion and understanding. However, while I found bits of the book of great interest, I think you would need to be an amateur astronomer to really appreciate it all. I found I was getting lost in detail after a while (too much on the sun's magnetism for starters) and I found it a chore to grind through to the end. Perhaps I am getting past the age where I can absorb such technical tomes!
For anyone who wants to understand more about our closet star, it is a good starting point, but be warned that it isn't easy reading.
Score: 7/10
November 2019
I bought this paperback, published in 2017, at a book sale for only $7. It comes in at just over 270 pages and has lots of colour photos and quite a few black and white diagrams to illustrate the discussion.
The Sun: 110 times wider than Earth; 15 million degrees at its core; an atmosphere so huge that Earth is actually within it.
Light takes eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the Sun. But its journey within the Sun takes hundreds of thousands of years. What is going on in there? What are light and heat? How does the Sun produce them and how on earth did scientists discover this?
The book details the latest research/findings in solar physics and introduces readers to the groundbreaking scientists, including the author, who pieced this extraordinary story together. It is written for the layman and the various scientific bits and pieces are well explained in simple terms. The author, a solar physicist herself, writes with passion and understanding. However, while I found bits of the book of great interest, I think you would need to be an amateur astronomer to really appreciate it all. I found I was getting lost in detail after a while (too much on the sun's magnetism for starters) and I found it a chore to grind through to the end. Perhaps I am getting past the age where I can absorb such technical tomes!
For anyone who wants to understand more about our closet star, it is a good starting point, but be warned that it isn't easy reading.
Score: 7/10
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