Between the lines

My star, Sol

The Sun is – as the old song has it – a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace. But it is also much more. Throughout human history, the Earth’s parent star has been an object of fascination, study, myth-making and worship. In Sunspots, Simon Barraclough explores these various identities through poetry, deftly juggling science and art. In one series of poems, for example, a chatty Sun muses on the artists who have tried to capture its essence. Ultimately, Vincent van Gogh, J M W Turner, Joan Mir ó, Georges Seurat and Kazimir Malevich are all judged to be “faves” in one way or another. Other poems are pastiches of works by historical poets. One of the best poems in the book is, in fact, a tribute to Byron’s “Darkness”. Whereas the original version imagined an apocalyptic world starved of sunlight, Barraclough’s homage adroitly flips the problem on its head, describing a Sun that has “stalled at its zenith”, turning the Earth into “a famished, loveless coal”. Literary-minded readers will surely delight in this game of spot-the-allusion, but Sunspots can be accessible as well as erudite. Many of the poems in it are short, stand-alone gems, including one that reads, in its entirety, “Your careless boyfriend, / half-uninterested, / has left a shape of skin upon your shoulder / unprotected, / unsunblocked. / I’ll work all day on that tender, precious spot.” There are scientific references, too, in wry asides such as “I’m starting to repeat myself, my daddy was a pulsar”. The result is a book that seems, in the words of one of the poems in it, designed to “appeal to the dedicated Sun lover and casual astronomer alike”.

• 2015 Penned in the Margins £12.99hb 112pp

Tales from the dark side

There is a lot of dark matter in the universe. We don’t know nearly enough about it. We are trying to fix that. And by the way, astrophysicists do some wild and crazy things at conferences. That, in a nutshell, is the message of Katherine Freese’s scientific-memoir-cum-popular-science book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter. In the relatively young field of dark-matter research, Freese counts as a veteran. A professor of astrophysics at the University of Michigan, she recently became the director of Sweden’s Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (September 2014 p49), and she has worked on the theory of dark matter – the mysterious substance that makes up around 26% of the universe’s total mass-energy – since the early 1980s. Her book, therefore, is a real insider’s account, stuffed full of details about the latest work in the field. Some of these details concern experimental searches for dark matter, while others relate to Freese’s own research, including her suggestion that the first stars to form in the early universe could have been powered by dark-matter annihilation, rather than by fusion of ordinary matter. Dubbed “dark stars”, these primeval behemoths may have been the predecessors of the supermassive black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies. Occasionally, the dark-matter community’s love of bulky acronyms dominates Freese’s writing (sample sentence: “Does LUX rule out DAMA, CoGeNT, and CRESST results?”), but for the most part, The Cosmic Cocktail is highly accessible for readers who lack her deep knowledge of the field and its various personalities. And while some of her anecdotes don’t seem to go anywhere, others offer useful lessons in just how much science takes place during the informal parts of scientific conferences – the swanky dinners, the impromptu games of table football, the early-hours clubbing sessions, you name it. For women working in an overwhelmingly male community, these kinds of activities can be tricky to negotiate; fortunately, Freese observes, a student job as a bar hostess “taught her to deflect men’s advances and demand to be treated professionally – skills that later proved invaluable in the male-dominated physics world”.

• 2014 Princeton University Press £19.95/$29.95hb 264pp

Another Hubble tribute

Most of us have long since grown accustomed to seeing images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on our computers or smartphone screens, but there is still something exceptional about seeing them set out in large glossy pages. With nearly 100 of the most iconic and mesmerizing images in Hubble’s vast archives, including four spectacular fold-out photos, Expanding Universe: Photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope is truly a celebration of Hubble’s success. This is a book of few words, but it does include some insights from veteran NASA astronomers Charles F Bolden Jr and John Mace Grunsfeld, as well as an eye-opening interview in which a photography critic, Owen Edwards, quizzes the head of the HST imaging group, Zoltan Levay, about how raw HST data are converted into the images that we ultimately gaze at in wonder. The perfect present for astronomy, photography or art enthusiasts, this coffee-table book is not just a collection of exquisite photographs but a marker of how far we have come in understanding our place in a vast and magnificent universe.

• 2015 Taschen £44.99hb 260pp