Customer Reviews

100 Billion Suns: The Birth, Life, and Death of the Stars

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read a lot of astronomy books, so any one book tends only to reinforce what I know already, plus just a little bit of additional information.

This book was different. I learned a lot about star formation and particularly about the meaning of the ubiquitous Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. The diagram is obligatory in a discussion of any astronomy other than planetary, but it tends to be described rather than explained. Here Kipenhahn goes through the life of stars of various sizes, showing their evolution along the H-R diagram and why the "main sequence" is so thickly populated (simply, because that's when the stars are burning hydrogen, which is what they do most but not all of the time).

Once done with the basics, he goes on to cover binary stars, neutron stars, and other stellar oddities. He also devotes a chapter to planetary formation and the possibility of life on other planets. Three brief but valuable appendices cover the measurement of stellar velocities, distances, and masses.

This book is a treasure and an authoritative work on the topic. Highly recommended.

Very good book, it was able to keep me interested and I could learn some new stuff, building on what I've already studied. This book is pretty brainy, there is no fluff. The print is nice and large. I got it very cheap.

Kippenhahn has the knack of simplifying some rather complex facts into an engrossing overview of the creation and lifespan of the stars. The book is written in clear language for the lay person with detail to precise facts. The book is an excellent primer on the stars and I've re-read my copy a number of times over the years. I also think this would be an excellent book to stimulate the interest of teenagers in astronomy. So many of the introductory textbooks on astronomy are editorially cold, boring, too technical in places, contain irrelevant chapters and are very expensive. Not so with this inexpensive but authoritative introduction to the stars. If you want to know more about stars, here's a great starting place.

with out question one of the most exciting books about star evolution.