Nearest Star: The Surprising Science of Our Sun
Jay M. Pasachoff
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 067401006X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Unlike the myriad points of light we gaze at in the night sky, our nearest star allows us to study the wonders of stellar workings at blindingly close range--from a mere 93 million miles away. And what do we see? In this book, two of the world's leading solar scientists unfold all that history and science--from the first cursory observations to the measurements obtained by the latest state-of-the-art instruments on the ground and in space--have revealed about the Sun. Following the path of science from the very center of this 380,000,000,000,000,000,000-megawatt furnace to its explosive surface, Nearest Star invites readers into an open-ended narrative of discovery about what we know about the Sun and how we have learned it.
How did the Sun evolve, and what will it become? What is the origin of its light and heat? How does solar activity affect the atmospheric conditions that make life on earth possible? These are the questions at the heart of solar physics, and at the center of this book. Having made optical solar observations with many solar telescopes and in the rockets and satellites, the authors bring their extensive personal experience to this story of how astronomers study the Sun, and what they have discovered about phenomena from eclipses to neutrinos, space weather, and global warming. Richly illustrated with an assortment of pictures from the latest solar missions and the newest telescopes, this book is a very readable, up-to-date account of science's encounter with our nearest star.
Cosmic Dawn: The Search for the First Stars and Galaxies (Astronomers' Universe)
Spacecraft for Astronomy (Frontiers in Space)
Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon
SpaceX's Dragon: America's Next Generation Spacecraft (Springer Praxis Books: Space Exploration)
is observed regularly by the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft (Plate VI). Appearance of the Chromosphere The chromosphere as seen in H-alpha spectroheliograms or spectrograms shows a lot of structure that isn’t seen in the photosphere. Sunspots themselves don’t show well in H-alpha, but the regions around them are relatively bright. These regions are known as plage, from the French word for beach. Within these plage regions in H-alpha we see narrow, dark filaments. These
total mass. The fourth datum on the list explains why the Sun is the center of our solar system: it has over 700 times as much mass as all of the solar system planets combined, including comets and asteroids. All of these objects form a self-gravitating system. Floating freely in space, they are held together by their mutual gravitational pulls and are relatively uninfluenced by other distant masses. In such a system, if one of the masses is much larger than the others, it will be nearly unmoved
partial listing of events involved in the launch and recovery of our Tuneable X-ray Imager telescope. The prelaunch activities include a checkout of all systems and a “vertical” test, in which it is verified that signals can be sent to and from the rocket. At T Ϫ5 minutes, the umbilical lines to the payload are disconnected and the rocket goes onto internal battery power for the remain- space missions der of the flight. It is interesting to note that the famous countdown to zero that you see any
telemetry command). In the case of a sounding rocket, the instrument needs to work for only 5 minutes, but experimenters had better be sure that it works for the right 5 minutes. For a satellite, it must work for months or years, under very harsh conditions. While these considerations may seem obvious, a mindset very different from that of the laboratory worker is required in order to put these warnings into practice. This explains why there is a special job title called aerospace engineer. A
chain. Traced the flow of energy and momentum from the lower into the upper atmosphere. Quantified the dramatic influences of the Sun and outer space on the Earth’s middle and upper atmosphere, increasing our ability to predict space weather. Examined the major energy sources, transport processes, and energy sinks in the MLTI, and applied this information to define the channels by which energy enters into, travels through, and is lost from the region. Supplied knowledge of the upper atmospheric
