Book Review: How to Read the Solar System

How to Read the Solar System:A Guide to the Stars and Planetsby Chris North and Paul AbelPegasus Books, 2015For the millions of faithful viewers who loved watching The Sky at Night, the marvelous BBC science program hosted for a staggering 55 years by Patrick Moore (from 1957 until shortly before his death in 2012), the appearance of How to Read the Solar System by Chris North and Paul Abel will be a bittersweet thing. The book is a pleasant reminder of a great program, but it can't help but also remind us of its now-departed giant of a host, with his forbidding face and plummy voice and utterly inviting manner.North and Abel are part of the team that's taken over The Sky at Night after Moore's death, and their book continues his program's simple and noble aim: to clarify astronomical science without simplifying it, to make interested viewers into active amateur participants in astronomy, and to convey the wonder of the heavens with as much unabashed enthusiasm as the very British DNA of the thing can muster.How to Read the Solar System is a perfect short handbook of our current knowledge of our solar system. In clear and accessible prose, North and Abel take their readers on a tour of the system's star, its four inner planets and its crowd of immense gaseous outer planets, its comets and asteroids, and they leaven it all with a short introduction to the history of astronomy. They distill a great deal of information into a short series of fast-paced chapters, and just as in the BBC series that provides their inspiration, they maintain a properly Olympian perspective:

While we inhabitants of [Earth] are aware of temperature variations that seem huge to us, these variations are tiny in the context of other planets and stars. In those terms, at an average of 150 million km (93 million miles) from the Sun, the Earth's surface temperature never moves too far from 0 C, allowing it to host rivers, lakes and oceans of liquid water.

North and Abel utilize findings from all the various space probe missions that have launched from Earth over the last forty years, right up to the present, with the Curiosity rover currently moving around on the surface of Mars, sniffing around for, among other things, signs of life - which, as our authors explain, can be difficult for even the most advanced probe to detect:

The signature of microbial life, past or present, is very hard to detect - as the Viking missions showed in the 1970s. Most techniques rely on searching for the waste products of life, which on Earth include compounds such as carbon dioxide and methane. The Martian atmosphere is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, so small increases due to life are hard to detect, but methane is much less common Part of the reason for this is that methane should be quickly split up by sunlight and lost from the Martian atmosphere. Recent evidence has shown that there are very small traces of methane in the atmosphere, though how localised these traces are and how long they exist for is yet to be determined.

Of course, the melancholy note sounding at the back of How to Read the Solar System derives from the fact that Pegasus Books is quite sensibly marketing it for an adult audience, particularly in the United States, where science education is so scattershot and rudimentary that for many potential readers, much of the book's contents will come as shocking revelation rather than refresher course. It's a bit depressing to imagine those potential readers; one can't help but think that if Patrick Moore's life's work had been successful, How to Read the Solar System could only now be marketed to schoolchildren. We'll have to hope the outlook is sunnier in Britain.