Leon Golub – författare

The story of the turbulent space around the sun—and the artisans and scientists who revealed its nature, elucidating the origins and fate of the solar system.We often imagine the solar system as a family of planets orbiting placidly around the sun, all against an empty black background. But our solar system swims in a perilous medium carved out by the sun’s solar wind: the heliosphere.The Turbulent Sun takes us on a journey through this vast hazard-filled bubble enveloping our cosmic ecosystem. In vivid detail, Leon Golub tells the story of the heliosphere as it emerged, then stretched and compressed over billions of years, shaping the solar system as we know it today. He reveals how the sun’s magnetic cocoon shielded Earth from dangerous galactic radiation, leaving it habitable, as fierce storms of solar wind stripped away the atmospheres of other planets.The result is a stunning tale not just of our cosmic origins but of science in the making. Glassmakers painstakingly measured the bending of light while photographers captured the sun in unprecedented detail, and chemists probed the energy states of the atom. Today, spacecraft are flying closer than ever to the sun, exposing the hazardous effects of space weather and mapping the future of the heliosphere as it sails through the galaxy. As Golub reminds us, scientific progress is never linear; it entails unexpected discoveries, serendipity and dead ends, and most importantly, cooperation across disciplines and borders.

How did the Sun evolve, and what will it become? What is the origin of its light and heat? How does solar activity affect the atmospheric conditions that make life on Earth possible? These are the questions at the heart of solar physics, and at the core of this book. The Sun is the only star near enough to study in sufficient detail to provide rigorous tests of our theories and help us understand the more distant and exotic objects throughout the cosmos. Having observed the Sun using both ground-based and spaceborne instruments, the authors bring their extensive personal experience to this story revealing what we have discovered about phenomena from eclipses to neutrinos, space weather, and global warming. This second edition is updated throughout, and features results from the current spacecraft that are aloft, especially NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, for which one of the authors designed some of the telescopes.