THE SUN'S HEARTBEAT: A BOOK REVIEW AS SUMMER APPROACHES

The Suns's Heartbeat

By Bob Berman

Little Brown and Company

New York

2011, 290 pages

"I need to laugh

And when the Sun is out

I've got something I can laugh about.."

Good Day Sunshine, Lennon-McCartney

By Juan Montoya

Like anyone who has seen the rosy-fingered dawn at sunrise at a beach or witnessed the reds and oranges of a spectacular sunset, I share a sense of wonderment at the class G star in the middle of our solar system that gives us life.

The Greeks called it Helios. Helios was imagined as a handsome god crowned with the shining aureole of the Sun who drove the chariot of the sun across the sky each day to earth-circling Oceanus and through the world-ocean returned to the East at night.

The Egyptian sun god was Aton Ra. King Tutankaton changed his name in honor of him. Aton Ra was considered the most powerful god of all in Eguptian mythology.

The Romans called it Sol and identified it with Janus, their major God.

Bob Berman, who wrote this book on the star most familiar to us, takes some of the most interesting facts about our sun and almost nonchalantly lays out some facts that startle the average reader. He should know. He wrote the popular "Night Watchman" column for Discover, and is currently a columnist for Astronomy, a host on NPR's Northeast Public Radio, and the science editor of The Old Farmer's Almanac.

I found his book almost by accident while helping my eight-year-old daughter with her solar system science project for school.

As I read the book, I almost forgot the reason I had picked it up. The more I learned about that familiar star that we often take for granted and which guarantees us life (and sometimes kills us), the more I wanted to share with her. In the end, I think she humored me until the project got done and she could go out and play with her friends in the sunny afternoon.

And, since I bored my daughter, I may as well bore you.

Did you know, for example, that it takes the sunlight 8 minutes 19 seconds to reach the earth from the sun some 93 million miles away?

Or that the furnace at its center consumes four million tons of matter every second and that the fusion equals to 91 billion megatons of TNT exploding per second?

The earth moves through space through space, as an example, at 66,000 miles per hour. The sun, on the other hand, zooms along through space carrying us along for the ride at an astounding 144 miles per second, more than 300 times faster than a rifle bullet.

At this rate, it still takes the sun 240 million years to circle the core of the Milky Way.

And, if you're like most of us New Age babies, you probably cover yourself up in sunscreen and try to stay away from the direct rays of the sun in order to avoid skin cancer. But guess what? vitamin D is absolutely necessary for human beings to survive. A lack of it results in decidedly worse results than the occasional sunburn.

"Our ancestors, migrating north," writes Berman, "developed vitamin D deficiencies (and) the results were swift and brutal. They were removed from the breeding pool by a cruel Darwinian process: the fetus inside the woman with rickets (a disease resulting from low vitamin D) is unable to emerge from her body, and both die in childbirth."

Anyway, did you know that our bodies make Vitamin D when out skin is truck by the sun's ultraviolet rays?

"Spending just 10 minutes in strong sunlight – the kind you get from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. between April and August – will allow your body to make as much vitamin D as you would get from drinking 200 glasses of milk," Berman writes.

I won't go on and spoil the narrative, but here are a few other facts picked up as I painted the planets in their orbit for my daughter's project.

For example:

You could fit 1.3 million planets the size of the Earth into the Sun.

Everything in the Solar System orbits around the Sun, including 8 planets and their moons, many dwarf planets, asteroids, comets and dust.

The mass of the Sun really dwarfs the mass of any other object in the Solar System; for example, it has 333,000 times the mass of Earth. If the Sun were hollow, you could fit more than one million Earths inside of it.

It accounts for more than 99.86 percent of the mass of the Solar System.

The Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago from a vast cloud of gas and dust called the Solar Nebula. Over millions of years, this gas and dust collected into the Sun and the planets.

It’s expected to last for another 7 billion years or so. Once all the usable hydrogen in the core runs out, the Sun will expand outward into a red giant, consuming the inner planets (even Earth).

The Sun is composed almost entirely of hydrogen (74 percent) and helium (25 percent), with other trace elements. It is this trace elements that formed the rest of its planets, including the carbon-based units we call the human race.

If you like science, or if you find yourself stuck with a school project as I was, this is a most enjoyable book you can torment your kids with. `