The Turbulent Sun: a Natural History Of Our Cosmic Origins and Future

The story of the turbulent space around the sun—and the artisans and scientists who revealed its nature, elucidating the origins and fate of the solar system.

We often imagine the solar system as a family of planets orbiting placidly around the sun, all against an empty black background. But our solar system swims in a perilous medium carved out by the sun’s solar wind: the heliosphere.

The Turbulent Sun takes us on a journey through this vast hazard-filled bubble enveloping our cosmic ecosystem. In vivid detail, Leon Golub tells the story of the heliosphere as it emerged, then stretched and compressed over billions of years, shaping the solar system as we know it today. He reveals how the sun’s magnetic cocoon shielded Earth from dangerous galactic radiation, leaving it habitable, as fierce storms of solar wind stripped away the atmospheres of other planets.

The result is a stunning tale not just of our cosmic origins but of science in the making. Glassmakers painstakingly measured the bending of light while photographers captured the sun in unprecedented detail, and chemists probed the energy states of the atom. Today, spacecraft are flying closer than ever to the sun, exposing the hazardous effects of space weather and mapping the future of the heliosphere as it sails through the galaxy. As Golub reminds us, scientific progress is never linear; it entails unexpected discoveries, serendipity and dead ends, and most importantly, cooperation across disciplines and borders.