The Sun's Heartbeat
And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet
by Bob Berman
Mem. Ed. $19.99
Pub. Ed. $25.99
You pay $1.99
The Sun's Heartbeat
The Sun isn’t a living thing, but it does have a pulse: it alters its appearance and energy output in 11-year cycles and reverses its magnetic polarity every 22 years. This is just one remarkable insight you’ll find in The Sun’s Heartbeat, Bob Berman’s anecdote-rich celebration of the star that makes life on Earth possible.
In a series of addictively readable chapters, we learn, for example, that the Sun emits most strongly in green light; yet it does not appear green because our eyes were designed by nature so that when the Sun’s primary colors—green, red and blue—strike the retina together, the mixture is perceived as white. Berman revisits the Sun’s birth: the process by which a cloud of hydrogen gas becomes a blinding ball of white fire the moment fusion begins. He also recounts the strange history of sunspot-spotting, involving a host of luminaries including Galileo, who engaged in a nasty battle of words with Christoph Scheiner over who saw them first.
Berman explains why the 18th-century race to observe a transit of Venus across the Sun’s surface was crucial to determining the Sun-Earth distance, and he introduces us to the tachocline, a boundary layer inside the Sun—discovered only in 1989—that plays a key role in our star’s magnetic variation. In other parts of the book, Berman shares findings that the overuse of sunscreen may actually increase the incidence of skin cancer, and he recalls how Wolfgang Pauli came to theorize the solar particles known as neutrinos—20 trillion of which are flying through your brain every second.
From the beauty of a total eclipse to the potential danger of geomagnetic storms, The Sun’s Heartbeat tells dramatic stories about the familiar star that crosses our sky daily.
Hardcover : 304 pages
Publisher: Hachette Book Group Usa ( July 13, 2011 )
Item #: 13-420500
ISBN: 9780316091015
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.25 inches
Product Weight: 18.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Copyright © Bookspan. Scientific American® is a registered trademark, used under license. Unauthorized use prohibited. All rights reserved.
45007201205ADFL
Card Security Code
The card security code is an added safeguard for your credit/debit card purchases. Depending on the type of card you use, it is either a three- or four-digit number printed on the back or front of your credit/debit card, separate from your credit/debit card number. To make shopping at Scientific American Book Club® even more secure, we require that you enter this number each time you make a credit/debit card purchase. Please note that your security code will not be stored with us even if you have saved your credit/debit card information.
