Table of Contents

Good Day, Sunshine: The Rising Sun.- Fire of Life.- Sunlight.- Daytime Star.- Cosmic Laboratory.- Children of the Stars.- Describing the Radiation.- Invisible Fires.- Energizing the Sun: Awesome Power, Enormous Times.- The Sun’s Central Pressure Cooker.- Nuclear Fusion, Anti-Matter and Hydrogen Burning.- Diluting the Radiation.- The Sun’s Remote Past and Distant Future.- Ghostlike Neutrinos: The Elusive Neutrino.- Neutrinos from the Sun.- Detecting Almost Nothing.- Solving the Solar Neutrino Problem.- Taking the Pulse of the Sun: Trapped Sounds.- Ode to the Sun.- Looking Inside the Sun.- Breaking the Symmetry.- Internal Flows.- Seeing Through the Sun.- A Magnetic Star: Islands of Intense Magnetism.- Bipolar Sunspots, Magnetic Loops and Active Regions.- Cycles of Magnetic Activity.- Internal Dynamo.- An Unseen World of Perpetual Change: The Sun’s Visible Edge Is an Illusion.- The Million-Degree Corona.- Closed Coronal Loops and Open Coronal Holes.- The Dynamic Ever-Changing Corona.- The Eternal Solar Wind.- Ulysses, SOHO and the Origin of the Sun’s Winds.- The Distant Frontier.- The Violent Sun: Energetic Solar Activity.- Solar Flares.- Flare Radiation from Energetic Electrons.- Energizing Solar Flares.- Erupting Prominences.- Coronal Mass Ejections.- Triggering Explosions on the Sun.- Energizing Space: The Ingredients of Space.- Probing the Solar Wind.- Earth’s Magnetic Cocoon.- Penetrating Earth’s Magnetic Defense.- Storing Invisible Particle Within Earth’s Magnetosphere.- Active Experiments in Space.- Northern and Southern Lights.- Geomagnetic Storms.- Astronauts and Satellites in Danger.- Space Weather.- Transforming the Earth’s Life-Sustaining Atmosphere: Fragile Planet Earth – The View From Space.- The Life-Saving Greenhouse Effect.- The Earth’s Changing Atmosphere.- Our Sun-LayeredAtmosphere.- The Inconstant Sun.- Solar Ultraviolet and Terrestrial Ozone.- The Vanishing Ozone.- Healing the Planet.- Fire and Ice: Clear Skies and Stormy Weather.- Turning on the Heat.- Solar Radiation and Global Warming.- Consequences of Overheating the Earth.- Life in the Fast Line.- Over the Long Haul.- Glossary.- Directory of Web Sites.- Further Reading.- Quotation References.- Author Index.- Subject Index

About the Author

Professor Lang has written several books about the Sun, as well as widely used reference works in astronomy and astrophysics. He has carried out radio observations of the active Sun with the Very Large Array in support of the SOHO spacecraft, teaches an extremely popular introductory course about the Sun to Tufts University students with non-scientific majors, and has served for two years as Visiting Senior Scientist in Solar Physics at NASA Headquarters.

Reviews

From the reviews of the second edition: "The second edition follows the first in its approach to topics but has been brought up to date – most especially by reviewing the results from five modern solar spacecraft and from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. … I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how the Sun works and behaves and how that in turn impinges upon the Earth and our life here." (C. R. Kitchin, Astronomy Now, April 2007) "Lang’s revision of his first edition … includes significant new material such as results from recent theoretical calculations, spectacular images of the sun from satellites such as TRACE and SOHO, and a clear overview of the apparent solution of the ‘solar neutrino problem.’ … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." (T. Barker, CHOICE, Vol. 44 (9), May, 2007)