Dimitri Mihalas has at least three claims to fame, not counting a Ph.D. in physics, math and astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.

One is that he has written eight textbooks and edited five, either by himself or with a co-editor, and has authored 150 scientific papers.

At the relatively young age of 42, Mihalas gained another distinction: election to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of three NAS members currently connected with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

He also stands out because he has achieved these accomplishments despite having spent much of his life in the grip of bipolar disorder, a relatively common, frequently debilitating physical condition characterized by mood swings that can range from suicidal depression to manic euphoria.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, poet John Berryman, actor Robin Williams, composer Ludwig van Beethoven, golfer John Daly and astrophysicist Mihalas are among the notable people with bipolar disorder.

Although Mihalas, now 72, continues to work at LANL one day a week, most of his time is spent in the study of his home in Santa Fe. It's there where he is putting the finishing touches on a third edition of his book Stellar Atmospheres.

Question: What interests you about stellar atmospheres?

Answer: The atmosphere is what we see when we look at the disk of the sun. We don't look into the sun. You see only a microscopic distance. It's so hot that all the material is ionized — the electrons are stripped off. And when that happens, they can emit radiation, but they can also absorb radiation. So the material becomes opaque, and you can only see the average distance a photon can go to get out if light is emitted; beyond that you don't see anything. When light from a star passes through an instrument called a spectrograph, we see the spectrum of a star and we can tell, by the depth and the number of different kinds of spectral lines, what is the chemical composition of the atmosphere of that star. That will be the primeval composition of that star, or what it was made of when it was formed.

Question: Can we tell what is going to happen to the sun?

Answer: If we know the distance to a star and we know how bright it appears to us, we can know how bright it really is at the surface. We can make models of how the temperature increases slowly as you go into the star's atmosphere. Down into the deep core there are nuclear reactions, and we try to study this chemical composition, along with something about the distribution of temperatures within the star. As the star gets older and older, it goes through different phases. For example, with the sun, it will grow brighter and brighter and cooler and cooler. As it does that at some point, it becomes the kind of star we call a Red Giant, which mean it is very cool and very bright and very big. So sometime a few billion years from now, the earth is going to be burned up inside a part of the sun's atmosphere.

Question: What is new in the new edition of your book?

Answer: We wrote the first one in 1970. Then we had a real breakthrough, so we wrote the second edition in 1978. That's a long time ago. A lot has happened, meanwhile. I want to try to summarize that.

Question: Can you give me a relatively simple example?

Answer: What I'm trying to do is improve the diagnostic procedures that people use when they examine stellar spectra. We have a beginning of an understanding of what we used to think were exotic stars — that is, stars that seemed to evolve in extraordinary ways. But you can figure out now where they go in terms of ordinary stellar evolution, where they burn hydrogen to make helium, and then they burn helium to make carbon or burn carbon to make oxygen, and so on. At some point, they have enough mass that they collapse and explode into what is called a Type 2 supernova. The inner part suddenly collapses into an extremely dense and heavy neutron star, and if the original star was of a certain mass, the remaining envelope still feels the force of gravity and it goes rushing inward.

When that outside shell hits this neutron star, we don't even have a way of imagining how hard it is. When it collides, there is a gigantic shock that throws the whole thing apart again, and that's where iron comes from, for example.

Question: Why is iron significant?

Answer: If these stars don't explode, we don't get iron. That means there is no hemoglobin, which is how oxygen is transported in the blood of animals, including humans. Without the supernovae, some of the other elements wouldn't be there. There would be no chlorophyll, which makes plants green and is the molecule that made photosynthesis. The line from the poet Walt Whitman is, "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars." And in the same sense, we are literally star children, because we only exist because iron was made in the cores of these stars.

Question: How did you happen to come to Los Alamos?

Answer: In 1997, I was teaching at the University of Illinois. That's when I got clobbered by bipolar disorder. The range in bipolar disorder starts with suicide at the bottom, goes up to being incapacitated by depression, to serious depression, to mild depression, to being normal. Then it goes the other way from being a little bit on the upside to being so out of your mind that you need to be locked in a cell, preferably padded and in a straight jacket. At the time I got clobbered, I suffered a major depression and ended up in a rehab hospital where they didn't monitor the blood level of what I was taking.

Question: What were you taking?

Answer: Lithium, which today nobody would take, because there are much better medicines. I went into a coma, and it was only after my daughter confronted the doctors that my treatment was changed.

Question: How long did it take to recover?

Answer: It took me weeks to recover fully. I was thoroughly psychotic and delusional. I could hear people in the ward planning to overthrow the management. Slowly, I got back to normal. It took about six months.

Question: So how did you get to Los Alamos?

Answer: Well, I decided to leave; no more Illinois. So, I had been asked to come to a meeting at Los Alamos. People I knew here said they thought I was dead. During my visit, I went in and said, "How would you like to hire me?" And they said, "Done."

Question: Did they realize your condition?

Answer: Yes, but it wasn't quite so simple because I had to re-activate my security clearance. They sent me to a psychiatrist in Albuquerque, and he asked me all the right questions. He knew this illness inside and out. He said, you've been through hell, but you've never been a security risk. He recommended a good psychiatrist.