The Secret Lives of Stars

(Scientific American Special Edition Volume 14, Number 4)

In this special edition from Scientific American, we invite you to forget about everyday life to spend some time with the stars. In the pages that follow, you’ll find the latest gossip on the glitterati, written by the astronomer shutterbugs themselves. Although the stars have revealed more than ever, they’ve been careful not to tell all, lest we grow bored with their antics. As authors Chryssa Kouveliotou, Robert C. Duncan and Christopher Thompson so aptly put it in “Magnetars”: “What other phenomena, so rare and fleeting that we have not recognized them, lurk out there?” We can hardly wait to find out