A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics by Jean-Louis Tassoul and Monique Tassoul, Princeton University Press, £26.95, ISBN 069111711X
TO OUR naked eye stars are just bright specks of light floating in a sea of night. The exception is, of course, the sun. And even though that star is a mere 150,000,000 kilometres away, we can see into only the top 500 kilometres. That leaves a mystery 699,500 kilometres deep before we get to its centre. To understand what stars are, we have to shift our viewpoint from the observational to the theoretical, to fly the mind rather than…
