The Sun, Our Star
Robert W. NoyesRobert Noyes now makes this new understanding available to us in a richly illustrated book. He explains the structure and inner workings of the Sun itself, from the nuclear reactions that turn four tons of matter into pure energy each second, to the intricate magnetic fields that produce solar prominences, flares, and sunspots. He also traces the evolution of our star, a story that began nearly five billion years ago with a dark cloud of dust and vapor floating in the void among other young stars of the Milky Way. Noyes describes how the mutual gravitational pull of these particles caused them to collapse inward, compressing and heating until the vast nuclear furnace at the center was ignited. The planets, formed from similar interstellar debris, received their first rays of light and warmth from the newly born star, and on one of the planets solar rays triggered the chemical reactions of life. Completing the cycle, Noyes tells how the sun will eventually expand to red-giant proportions, when it will fill our sky and boil away the oceans, only to end its days as a tiny white dwarf.
But today, long before the Sun dies, we are turning more and more to solar power as a partial solution to our energy shortage, a subject to which Professor Noyes devotes considerable attention. Distinguished by its
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