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Revealing the secrets of the sun

By Michael Brooks

13 July 2011

Bob Berman’s funny and fascinating tales cast light on the unknown life of our favourite star in The Sun’s Heartbeat

There are jaw-dropping moments in every astronomy lecturer’s life, but you don’t expect them to come from observations of carbon-based life forms. Once, when warning of the dangers of looking directly at the sun during an upcoming eclipse, a woman phoned into Bob Berman’s radio show and asked: “If these eclipses are so dangerous, why do we keep having them?”

It is easy to laugh, but there is a serious point here: most people are startlingly ignorant of some basic…

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