Twenty Worlds

This is a truly entertaining and informative book, but the reason I'm giving it the full five stars has as much to do with the refreshing novelty of the author's style as anything else. There's novelty in the subject-matter too--the wide variety of recently discovered exoplanets orbiting other stars. . . . He's a professional astronomer too, though you wouldn't guess that from his writing style, which is as straightforward and lucid as science writing gets. -- PopularScience.co.uk With Deacon's book we not only see that there are a multitude of worlds out there, but the variety and conditions in which they were born are as strange as we could hope to imagine. They all have individual characteristics, some similar to our own family, others bizarrely different. His choice of worlds, I feel, has been carefully done, to show the known variety in the family of discovered planets. . . . Deacon's style of writing is easy to follow and keeps the reader interested throughout. . . . The book was very enjoyable to read and the 200 pages kept the reader wanting more, I genuinely felt I was both entertained and informed. -- Physics Education With thousands of exoplanets currently known, it must be a daunting task to choose twenty of them to highlight. Yet, that is exactly what Deacon sets out to do. The book, rather than presenting a cornucopia of bizarre exoplanets (and there are many of them out there), uses a curated sample of twenty exoplanets to tell a story about how these systems are detected, studied and what they can tell us about the birth, evolution and even death of planets, as well as their interaction with their host stars. The sheer diversity of the exoplanets detected poses a fascinating challenge to planet-formation theorists and exoplanet observers alike. -- Nature Astronomy This is the perfect book to introduce exoplanet science. . . . But Twenty Worlds is not really for those who want to find out more about any one of the planets covered. Rather it reveals what each of them represents to the field in general. Its real value is in the analogies that Deacon uses to clarify difficult and complex exoplanetary scientific methods to the reader. Nowhere will you find a more descriptive book to understand the processes used to learn about the existence of these worlds. Five stars. -- BBC Sky at Night Magazine A wonderfully enjoyable tour of twenty diverse worlds that orbit distant stars. Deacon uses simple ideas from science to show us how each world has its own personality--its own story. Twenty Worlds is an accessible introduction to some of the most exciting discoveries in astronomy. --Michael E. Summers, professor of planetary sciences and astronomy, George Mason University