Diamonds Everywhere: Awe-inspiring Astronomy Discoveries is a colourful compilation of fascinating facts about the cosmos. It is written by Tom Kerss, an author and astronomer who has worked at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich for over six years.

Its 101 topics take the form of attention-grabbing and surprising statements like “Your hair collects dust from comets”, fascinating facts like “Some stars are so cool, you could touch them without scolding your hand” or questions such as “Has any spacecraft departed the Solar System?” There are even some fantastical or unreal titles such as “The Milky Way is a Queen Bee”.

Unlike a lot of popular science books of amazing-but-true facts, Diamonds Everywhere makes a good cover-to-cover read as well as something to dip into. It is also very well presented with most topics formatted to fit on a single page and accompanied by a full-page and borderless colour image on the opposite leaf. Rather than having monolithic blocks of text, each topic has large bold eye-catching pull quotes and salient points highlighted in colour.

The main drawback to each topic being edited down to fit on one page is that none can be covered in great depth. The information often remains superficial leaving you with unanswered questions and there are no references or useful lists of further reading to give a steer where to look next.

One of the exceptions to the standard format would be the last topic on the JWST which has two pages of text and two spreads showing iconic photos from its first image releases from July 2022. One features the “cosmic cliffs” of the Carina Nebula and the other shows the deep-field image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. There is a full list of acknowledgements for the photos and images at the back of the book together with a useful glossary of astronomical terms.

The blurb of Diamonds Everywhere warns you to “Prepare to change the way you think about the Universe!” and that seems an appropriate tagline for this book. Whether you are new to astronomy or more experienced, you will certainly find numerous surprising revelations contained within.