The Nearest Star: The Surprising Science of our Sun, 2nd Edition by Leon Goulb and Jay M Pasachoff is a comprehensive look at our sun. Goulb is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and has been studying the sun since the mid-1970s Skylab missions. Pasachoff is the Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College. He has been on fifty-eight solar eclipse expeditions He his the author of the the undergraduate text book, The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium. He has received the Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society and the Jules Janssen Prize from the Societe Astronomique de France.

The Nearest Star is a comprehensive look at our sun for the layman. The authors keep the math to a minimum and stress why studying our sun is important in learning about stars. Special consideration is given to the outer atmosphere of the sun, since it is the only place we can study a star's outer atmosphere. Although some book is easy to follow other parts, particularly the parts about the corona and neutrinos, tend to go deeper into science than the average reader may be ready for.

There is plenty of good information and interesting information about the sun that most people probably haven't heard before. The sun is so dense that it takes 100,000 years for a light to move from the core of the sun to the surface. Studying the sun presents some challenges. A reflector telescope can receive 50,000 watts per square meter. Even if the mirror absorbs (rather than perfectly reflecting) a few percent of this energy the heat will be enough distort the mirror. One way to solve this problem is the Vacuum Tower Solar Telescope. The entire telescope is a vacuum chamber floating in a bath of mercury to reduce vibrations. The latest satellite efforts to study the sun are also covered in detail along with the different methods of observation from visible light to x-rays.

The Nearest Star is a very comprehensive look at out sun although parts may be above the non-science minded. There is also a nice tie into the earth and the effect the sun and changes the sun has on our planet. Ice ages, different layers of the atmosphere, and the Van Allen Belts are covered. One of the most frightening aspects of the sun in ancient times, a solar eclipse, now turns out to be the best time to study the sun.

Reading this book is the most that I have learned about astronomy since college and maybe even more than I learned in six semester hours of astronomy classes. I grew up in the 1970s reading about all new discoveries from the probes we landed to Mars and the Voyagers that are long gone. I have always been science minded and for me to find something that I actually learn from with resorting to mind bending mathematics is a rare thing. The Nearest Star does an excellent job at presenting the latest scientific information in a manner that a non-scientist can understand.
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The sun is, for us here on Earth, the most important star: the one that dominates our world, essential to our lives, as well as what will ultimately destroy our planet.

Golub and Pasachoff lay out not just our knowledge of our star, but how we gained that knowledge. It has been a long process, gaining speed only in the last couple of centuries, and a far more convoluted path than at first glance it might appear. That's because the Earth and Sun interact, and it isn't always apparent what the cause of a particular effect is. Climate in particular is the product of a number of interacting and chaotic causes. Our orbit is elliptical, not circular; the Earth precesses on its axis; the Sun itself has cycles, the eleven-year sunspot cycle as well as other, longer cycles--and once we know all this, there's still more to understand.

We look at the Sun, and we see a great, glowing ball. It doesn't look complicated at all. Yet even before we had more advanced instruments, eclipses and the telescope let us discover and begin to study the photosphere of the Sun. The authors make the tale of how we made crucial discoveries, as well as the substance of those discoveries themselves, exciting and compelling.

The subject matter is at times demanding, but the writing is clear and understandable.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys good science writing.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

The sun, our ally in the stars, is explained in an intriguing and mostly understandable way. I did read this book in smaller chunks of information in order to fully be able to understand all the information that was given.

Leon Goulb and Jay M. Pasachoff an astrophysicist and astronomer answer many fascinating questions about the origin, activity and purpose of the sun. Written in a style that presents all the scientific information you need with pictures, charts, graphs and data, but still understandable enough for someone without a strong scientific background to understand. In Nearest Star we learn what the sun is made of and how it came to be. Most amazing is how the Earth is at just the right place in our solar system to reap the most benefits of our sun. Also, how long the sun will be able to support life on Earth as we know it, a comforting yet terrifying fact.

Other interesting things explored are the phenomenon of the northern lights and insights into global warming.

A perceptive read for anyone interested in the science of the sun or wanting to know more about how our solar system works.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review ( )

We start at the universe and make our way towards the earth, a sensible approach that neatly describes Nearest Star. The sun is still several parts mystery, but the amount of knowledge we have distilled is gigantic. Golub and Pasachoff disburse it in an organized and immersing fashion.

-It seems that all stars are powered by same process. A chart of tens of thousands of them shows a very tight, continuous grouping. They have the same patterns and processes of energy release. They are made of the same stuff.
-Our sun is so dense it can take 110,000 years and possibly ten times longer for x-ray “light” to get from its core to its surface. The waves are scattered, absorbed and re-emitted many times before they see the dark of the universe.
-Our sun is made up almost entirely of two common elements – hydrogen and helium - 99%. Everything else is just trace.
-From our outpost here, the smallest thing we can see on the surface is a granule, a roughening of a tiny area, the size of the entire eastern US seaboard blurred into one spot, if that gives a better idea of the difference in scale between earth and the engine that powers it. Granules are boiling bubbles of gas, that cool and sink again

There remain numerous unsolved factors. Solar flares, for example, are the subject of almost as many theories as theorists, the authors say. They then go on to list a seemingly endless variety of projects, probes, satellites and telescopes all aimed at answering questions about the sun. We’re quietly on it, committing billions to get the answers.
There is also an examination of auroras, the northern lights, which have finally ceased defying explanation. It seems there is a complete electrical circuit between the sun and our ionosphere, and when it is closed, the sky lights up. They explain the colors and the curtain effect such that it actually makes sense.

There is also the old saw of how the sun will swell up into a red giant and subsume the earth – in three billion years. But we will be long gone, because (although the book does not say, but) when our magnetic fields dissipate, the full force of the sun will hit earth relentlessly, and bake it. That we haven’t had a magnetic pole reversal in 700,000 years (normal is 100,000) is a good indicator that the georeactor powering our magnetic field is weakening. Measurements confirm this.
It is also fascinating that just slight fluctuations in the tilt of the earth and the ellipse of its orbit are the entirely predictable sources of ice ages. The band of livable climate provided by the sun is incredibly narrow, can be upset by the slightest variation, and the changes incurred are extreme. Add pollution, and all bets are off.

David Wineberg ( )