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Review - "Stars and Stellar Evolution " , by De Boer & Seggewiss
Here is a much longer and more accurate review of this excellent book on the evolution of stars, further to my recent compact review in my thread on Stellar Evolution books:
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BOOK REVIEW
"Stars and Stellar Evolution", 2008, by Klaas De Boer and Wilhem Seggewiss, Publisher: EDP Sciences, ISBN 9782759803569
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This very affordable paperback of modest thickness is an excellent concise and very detailed primer on stellar evolution. All the observational facts are here, but without bogging the reader down with too much of the recondite physics of stellar interiors. This terse volume somewhat resembles an excellent set of university lecture notes, but it is also greatly padded out with ALL of the necessary details. It is not too maths heavy , and contains megatons of useful stellar data and HR diagrams! The factor that makes this book more approachable than the usual very physics-heavy text on stellar evolution is the fact that it presents the intricate and non-simplified details of how the many and various types of stars evolve, mainly in terms of the observable quantities and their functional relations.....for instance: surface temperature, stellar mass, stellar luminosity, Color-magnitude diagrams, SEDs and spectra. So the necessary equations are there, but the pages of this book are not loaded with complex physics and mathematics.
While aimed at a readership-level of upper level undergraduates, and above, in astronomy & physics, the book is understandable if you are a "resolute and undertaking character" that has already done the equivalent of a unit or two of rigorous physics at the university/advanced-college level and if you are also VERY comfortable with: functions and relations of variables, algebra, and the graphical display of numerical data. In addition, calculus is necessary in a few harder chapters.
Fundamentally, this is a densely-written and very highbrow text at the "complex technical level". However, many individual pages only contain only a few, or even no, equations........but this book IS full of spectra, and color-magnitude and Hertzprung-Russell diagrams, and it contains very numerous graphs of the relations between various numerical parameters......for instance parameters such as Stellar mass, Stellar Surface Temperature and Radius, Stellar Luminosity, and time-elapsed since the formation of a star. Thus, this book takes fundamentally a descriptive, but also a "numerical and physics", approach to explaining how stars of various types change with the passsage of time after their formation.....but it is not for people who think they can somehow magically learn complex science without some struggle!.
Understanding this book will also be much easier for the sort of reader who has already read quite a number of astronomy books that are significantly more complex than "elementary & introductory popular-level astronomy books that gloss over details and oversimplify things".
There is also a very concise, but remarkably cogent and detailed, coverage of topics such as stellar structure, the formation of stellar spectra, and nuclear fusion within stars. But the purpose of this book is more to describe, in great detail, what happens as stars evolve, instead of labouring away at developing all of the complex physics..... so this approach makes this text much more accessible to undergraduates in the physical sciences and to super-advanced amateur astronomers. But a word of warning here; this book will be much too hard for the average amateur astronomer.
All in all, this is an excellent work....it is remarkably sophisticated and not oversimplified, and it is not out-of-date in the way that lower-undergraduate astronomy textbooks inevitably are. Instead of reading this complex and somewhat demanding book, you could instead read a very-simple descriptive text on stellar evolution, or you could read a lower-undergraduate astronomy textbook with "maximum handholding"......but it is far preferable to grapple with the intricate details of what is really going on by reading this book!
Last edited by madbadgalaxyman; 31-03-2016 at 08:35 AM.
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