Extreme Stars: At the Edge of Creation

by James B. Kaler

Over the past 200 years, our knowledge of stars has expanded enormously. From seeing myriad dots of different brightnesses, we haved moved on to measure their distances, temperatures, sizes, chemical compositions, and even ages, finding both young and ancient stars that dwarf our Sun and are dwarfed by it. Unique in its approach, Extreme Stars describes the lives of stars from a new perspective by examining their amazing features. The result is a refreshing, up-to-date, and engaging overview of stellar evolution, suitable for everyone interested in viewing or studying the stars. Ten chapters, generously illustrated throughout, explain the natures of the brightest, the largest, the hottest, and the youngest, among other kinds of stars, ending with a selection of the strangest stars the Universe has to offer. Extreme Stars shows how stars develop and die and how each extreme turns into another under the inexorable twin forces of time and gravity. James B. Kaler is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He has held Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, has been awarded medals for his work from the University of Liège in Belgium and the University of Mexico, and most recently was selected to give the Armand Spitz lecture by the Great Lakes Planetarium Association. His research area, in which he has published over 100 papers, involves dying stars. Kaler has also written for a variety of popular magazines, including Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, and Scientific American. His previous books include The Ever-Changing Sky (Cambridge, 1996), Stars and their Spectra (Cambridge, 1997), Cosmic Clouds (Scientific American Library Paperback, 1998), and The Little Book of Stars (Copernicus, 2000). He is a current member of the Board of Directors of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and is a frequent guest on radio and television shows.

Genres: Astronomy, Science, Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 2001

Reviews

[Yael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book made for hours of pleasurable dipping. Here are weird stars such as Eta Carinae with its false nova behavior, and the Pistol Star, one of the biggest and brightest stars in the Milky Way. With a wealth of data on the biggest, the brightest, the most unstable, and other categories of rare and unusual stars, this book should be in the library of everyone at all interested in astronomy.

[Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has some good information that generally covers the normal stuff about the different regions of the HR diagram and stellar formation/evolution/death. However, it spends a considerable amount of time cataloging example stars. I believe this is trying to provide more interest for amateur observers. However, for someone that doesn't own a telescope or look at the stars, this was a lot of tedious, wasted words. For me, the good parts of this book were not enough to make it worth reading.