How the Sun and the Stars Shine

Gianpaolo Bellini is an emeritus professor at the University of Milan and an emeritus scientist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics. As an experimental physicist specializing in elementary particles and astroparticles, he has conducted and led numerous experiments in some of the world's most renowned laboratories, including CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), IHEP (Protvino, Russia), Fermilab (Batavia, USA), and the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (Assergi, Italy).His research and discoveries span various fields, including resonances, coherent interactions on nuclei, the lifetime of all particles containing a charm quark, and the mechanisms that power the Sun and stars.Throughout his career, he has received several prestigious international awards, including the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize, the Enrico Fermi Prize, and the Wanda and Giuseppe Cocconi Prize from the European Physical Society, the latter in recognition of the Borexino collaboration.The Borexino experiment, which he conceived and led at the Gran Sasso laboratories, achieved groundbreaking results that were recognized among the world's top 10 scientific breakthroughs in both 2014 and 2020. In honor of this achievement, the Italian Post issued a commemorative stamp.Bellini is the author of approximately 220 papers published in international peer-reviewed journals, the editor of 11 books on elementary particle physics, and the author of four popular science books.

• Introduction and Guidance for Readers.- The Context.- The Context.- The battle for unprecedented radiopurity.- First phase of detector construction.- Completion of construction and installation. The detector goes into operation.- What powers the sun?.- Sun stability and Earth orbit.- And the stars?.- Corollaries.- Farewell Borexino.- Glossary.