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BIOLOGISTS can touch, smell, prod and even taste their work, and physicists can squeeze, freeze, charge, hit and irradiate. Astronomers can only stand back and stare. They have been doing this for a long, long time with rich results, and are renowned for involving other scientists.

Take mathematics. Christopher Linton鈥檚 From Eudoxus to Einstein shows how astronomers were forced to develop whole new areas of mathematics, such as trigonometry, to predict and explain the movement of the sun, moon, planets and comets. Two problems led to calculus: the gravitational perturbations that complicate the motion of the moon, and the analytically difficult solutions to Kepler鈥檚 law of equal areas, derived from observation that a planet鈥檚 orbital speed was linked to its distance from the sun.

And today鈥檚 cosmological general relativity has been a spur to many strange geometries. Linton presents the 4000-year history of astronomy from a refreshingly different viewpoint by stressing the underlying maths and its challenges. His treatment is thorough and clear, but not daunting. Good school mathematics suffices.

Theologians have also played a hand in astronomy鈥檚 progress. Owen Gingerich beautifully illustrates the entanglement of the Roman Catholic church in cosmology as he traces the impact of a single book, De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium, on academic and religious communities during the 16th century. Copernicus鈥檚 demotion of Earth from its central position in the universe had shocked the church.

Gingerich debunks writer Arthur Koestler鈥檚 suggestion that De Revolutionibus was 鈥渢he book nobody read鈥�, taking that derogatory comment for his book鈥檚 title. It is a fascinating and eminently readable account of how the Copernican sun-centred system surreptitiously made its way into European thought. The first and second editions of Copernicus鈥檚 De Revolutionibus together added up to only about 600 copies, yet it was the most influential and inspirational scientific work of all time. For 30 years Gingerich has wandered into libraries around the world charting the ownership, annotations and marginalia of this revolutionary tome.

Physics, of course, has become astronomy鈥檚 bedfellow during the past 150 years, as Donald Perkins shows clearly in Particle Astrophysics. Aiming neatly at third-year undergraduate level, Perkins delves into the cosmological history of the developing universe. Using the general theory of relativity as a foundation, together with the quantum mechanical and quantum field theory interactions between fundamental particles, he charts the origin of matter and structure in the early universe. He then turns to dark matter and dark energy and the production of cosmic rays, gamma rays, stellar neutrinos and gravitational radiation. Finally the book considers stellar evolution and the production of heavy elements. Worked examples, informative summaries and clear figures make this an exemplary textbook.

Geologists seem to love volcanoes. Not only do volcanoes provide a window into the planet鈥檚 soul, they also underline the fact that it is 鈥渁live鈥�. Their characteristics are diverse. On Earth we have three kinds: hotspot volcanoes, such as Kilauea on Hawaii, still erupting after 21 years; subduction-zone volcanoes, such as Etna in Sicily and Mount St Helens in Washington state, where an oceanic tectonic plate slides under a continental plate; and submarine volcanoes that form at mid-ocean ridges where the sea floor splits apart. One of the great surprises of the exploration of the solar system was that volcanic activity seems to be ubiquitous. Geologists have much to share with astronomers.

Volcanoes were commonplace on Mars and Venus. Io was pumping volcanic sulphurous gases into space when Voyager 1 passed in 1979. Cryovolcanism, in which internal heating drives water, gases and even solid fragments to the surface, modified the surfaces of Ganymede and Triton. Ancient basaltic lava flows reshaped many lunar craters. All these topics are covered with insight, even cheerfully, in Volcanic Worlds, by Rosaly Lopes and Tracy Gregg. Unusually, given the preponderance of male scientists, each of its 11 chapters is the work of an active female researcher, and each is enlivened with scientific reminiscences, career notes and numerous illustrations.

Cosmology is becoming more and more popular in today鈥檚 universities. If the introductory courses have not dampened your enthusiasm and you now want to delve into the detail, then Scott Dodelson鈥檚 Modern Cosmology is the book to satisfy you. Here you can suss out the structure of the acoustic peaks of the anisotropic spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, use the Einstein-Boltzmann equations to probe the perturbations of the Friedman-Robertson-Walker space-time universe, and revel in the challenges of analysing the huge data sets that are now available. This beautifully crafted tome takes you to the frontiers of research.