Margaret Harris reviews 15 Million Degrees: a Journey to the Centre of the Sun by Lucie Green
The question of how the Sun shines is a perennial one for popular-science books. Usually, it crops up as a sideshow to general discussions about particle physics, or as a kind of preamble to more exotic-sounding subjects such as supernovae or fusion power. But Lucie Green’s book 15 Million Degrees: a Journey to the Centre of the Sun is different. Here, the workings of the Sun are the main event.
The book’s first 70 pages cover the so-called “standard model” of the Sun: hydrogen fusing into helium in the core, photons being absorbed and emitted on a 170,000-year journey to the surface, gaps in the solar emission spectrum and so forth. As Green points out, all of this was known, more or less, by 1957, so readers with a good background in physics can probably skim this part and concentrate on later chapters. These delve more deeply into topics such as sunspots, solar rotation, magnetic eruptions and, above all, the many ongoing space and ground-based observations of the Sun’s complex behaviour. Green, a solar physicist in the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, UK, is involved in some of these observations herself, and her enthusiasm for the subject is obvious. Clearly, there is much more to the Sun than meets the eye.
- 2016 Viking £18.99hb 304pp
