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Bob Berman’s funny and fascinating tales cast light on the unknown life of our favourite star in The Sun’s Heartbeat

There are jaw-dropping moments in every astronomy lecturer’s life, but you don’t expect them to come from observations of carbon-based life forms. Once, when warning of the dangers of looking directly at the sun during an upcoming eclipse, a woman phoned into Bob Berman’s radio show and asked: “If these eclipses are so dangerous, why do we keep having them?”

It is easy to laugh, but there is a serious point here: most people are startlingly ignorant of some basic…

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