Stardust from Space

Written in a rather romantic, not-very-quantitative style, this book has spreads on shooting stars, the birth of a star, building the planets, Comets, Asteroids, Meteorites (two spreads), the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the death of a star, and a Glossary. The informal style could mislead: one could well infer that most of the objects named are made from material of the same, unspecified constitution – the stardust. It is not made clear that the ‘burning gas’ in the Sun is changing from one element to another, rather than combusting as would gas on a kitchen stove. The minor tectonic plates are not mentioned. The gas constituting the Sun is described as ‘so tightly squashed together that it is 50 times more solid than the rocks on the Earth’s surface’, from which one might well infer that the density of the Sun is 50 times the density of the Earth; this is true only at the core – the average density of the Sun is about a quarter of the density of the Earth. The expected eventual expansion and collapse of the Sun is announced, but the fatal consequences for the Earth are not mentioned.