How did the Sun and other stars come into being, what keeps them hot and makes them shine, how do they change with time, and what will be their ultimate fate? These are questions of interest to people of all ages; this book, The Life and Death of Stars, provides a lively and comfortably accessible account of them.

It begins with a discussion of radiation, which carries a message from the stars and tells us just about everything we know about them. The text continues with a description of gravity, which rules the universe, and the motion that holds everything up. We then take a voyage inside the atom to discover the subatomic particles that govern how energy is liberated inside stars, including the related topic of radioactive transformation of the elements. Heat, temperature, and pressure also are vital to our understanding of the interiors of the stars and their birth, growth, and decay.

These fundamental physical concepts provide the foundation for what follows, which is the approach that George Gamow used more than a half-century ago in his classic account of The Birth and Death of the Sun. This book made a tremendous impression and inspired an entire generation, but many of its conclusions are completely out of date. Although consistent with what was known at the time, subsequent improvements in our knowledge have shown that Gamow was misled about the dominant nuclear reactions in the Sun, the course of stellar evolution, and the origin of the elements. However, he had a marvelous physical insight and applied fundamental physics to our understanding of the Sun, without an equation in sight.

This book, The Life and Death of Stars, is written in a light and friendly style that can be appreciated by all readers, without being unnecessarily weighed down by specialized material, scientific jargon, or mathematical equations. Throughout this book, the basic concepts are translated into a common language with apt, down-to-earth metaphors and analogies, making them accessible to general readers and adding to the material. The text also is humanized with historical anecdotes about significant contributors to our celestial science.