This book is a sequel to Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology (Springer 2011). With the help of many pictures, the reader is introduced into the way of thinking of ancient believers in a flat earth. The first part offers new interpretations of several Presocratic cosmologists and a critical discussion of Aristotle's proofs that the earth is spherical. The second part explains and discusses the ancient Chinese system called gai tian. The last chapter shows that, inadvertently, ancient arguments and ideas return in the curious modern flat earth cosmologies.

In the mid-sixteenth century, Copernicus asserted that the Earth was not the center of the universe as was generally believed, but that the sun lay there instead. The relegation of the Earth to the rank of an orbiting planet meant that humankind lost its privileged position as well, thus prompting re-evaluation of all facets of human existence. This transformation in worldview gathered momentum throughout Shakespeare's writing career, yet his canon appears to lack reference to it. Peter D. Usher has studied Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays and has uncovered a consistent pattern of reference to phenomena that prove the correctness of the new worldview, including reference to the infinite universe of stars. These data could not have been known without telescopic aid, which indicates that systematic telescopic study of celestial objects began before the generally accepted date of 1610. In Shakespeare and Saturn, Usher summarizes earlier results and shows that in All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare takes account of the last supernova eruption of 1604 known to have occurred in the Milky Way galaxy. He shows further that in Much Ado About Nothing and The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare makes observations concerning Saturn's spectacular ring system that are remarkably accurate.

An accessible and thought-provoking introduction to timespans in the natural world, featuring more than 80 beautifully designed diagrams. Which organisms live the longest? How does the natural world recover from fire? How long do eggs take to hatch? What are the world's fastest and slowest growing plants? Which species invest the most in parental care? How Nature Keeps Time discovers the natural world's most important and intriguing patterns of time. Beautifully designed with stunning colour photography and more than 80 reader-friendly charts and diagrams, this witty book examines a broad range of species from across the world and throughout time. From the lifecycle of immortal jellyfish and identifying the perfect amount of time for a 'good sleep' to mass extinction and the destruction of the coral reef, Helen Pilcher tackles highly relevant and fascinating topics in this deeply entertaining read.

This exhaustive work sheds new light on unsolved questions in gamma-ray astrophysics. It presents not only a complete introduction to the non-thermal Universe, but also a description of the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov technique and the MAGIC telescopes. The Fermi-LAT satellite and the HAWC Observatory are also described, as results from both are included. The physics section of the book is divided into microquasars and pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe), and includes extended overviews of both. In turn, the book discusses constraints on particle acceleration and gamma-ray production in microquasar jets, based on the analyses of MAGIC data on Cygnus X-1, Cygnus X-3 and V404 Cygni. Moreover, it presents the discovery of high-energy gamma-ray emissions from Cygnus X-1, using Fermi-LAT data. The book includes the first joint work between MAGIC, Fermi-LAT and HAWC, and discusses the hypothetical PWN nature of the targets in depth. It reports on a PWN population study that discusses, for the first time, the importance of the surrounding medium for gamma-ray production, and in closing presents technical work on the first Large-Size-Telescope (LST; CTA Collaboration), along with a complete description of the camera.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The third edition of this indispensable book in radio interferometry provides extensive updates to the second edition, including results and technical advances from the past decade; discussion of arrays that now span the full range of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum observable from the ground, 10 MHz to 1 THz; an analysis of factors that affect array speed; and an expanded discussion of digital signal-processing techniques and of scintillation phenomena and the effects of atmospheric water vapor on image distortion, among many other topics. With its comprehensiveness and detailed exposition of all aspects of the theory and practice of radio interferometry and synthesis imaging, this book has established itself as a standard reference in the field. It begins with an overview of the basic principles of radio astronomy, a short history of the development of radio interferometry, and an elementary discussion of the operation of an interferometer. From this foundation, it delves into the underlying relationships of interferometry, sets forth the coordinate systems and parameters to describe synthesis imaging, and examines configurations of antennas for multielement synthesis arrays. Various aspects of the design and response of receiving systems are discussed, as well as the special requirements of very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), image reconstruction, and recent developments in image enhancement techniques and astrometric observations. Also discussed are propagation effects in the media between the source and the observer, and radio interference, factors that limit performance. Related techniques are introduced, including intensity interferometry, optical interferometry, lunar occultations, tracking of satellites in Earth orbit, interferometry for remote Earth sensing, and holographic measurements of antenna surfaces. This book will benefit anyone who is interested in radio interferometry techniques for astronomy, astrometry, geodesy, or electrical engineering.

This book presents lecture materials from the Third LOFAR Data School, transformed into a coherent and complete reference book describing the LOFAR design, along with descriptions of primary science cases, data processing techniques, and recipes for data handling. Together with hands-on exercises the chapters, based on the lecture notes, teach fundamentals and practical knowledge. LOFAR is a new and innovative radio telescope operating at low radio frequencies (10-250 MHz) and is the first of a new generation of radio interferometers that are leading the way to the ambitious Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to be built in the next decade. This unique reference guide serves as a primary information source for research groups around the world that seek to make the most of LOFAR data, as well as those who will push these topics forward to the next level with the design, construction, and realization of the SKA. This book will also be useful as supplementary reading material for any astrophysics overview or astrophysical techniques course, particularly those geared towards radio astronomy (and radio astronomy techniques).

Completely revised and updated, this new edition provides a readable, beautifully illustrated journey through world cultures and the vibrant array of sky mythology, creation stories, models of the universe, temples and skyscrapers that each culture has created to celebrate and respond to the power of the night sky. Sections on the archaeoastronomy of South Asia and South East Asia have been expanded, with original photography and new research on temple alignments in Southern India, and new material describing the astronomical practices of Indonesia, Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries. Beautiful photographs of temples in India and Asia have been added, as well as new diagrams explaining the alignment of these structures and the astronomical underpinnings of temples within the Pallava and Chola cultures. From new fieldwork in the Four Corners region of North America, Dr. Penprase has included accounts of Pueblo skywatching and photographs of ceremonial kivas that help elucidate the rich astronomical knowledge of the Pueblo people. The popular "Archaeoastronomy of Skyscrapers" section of the book has been updated as well, with new interpretations of skyscrapers in Indonesia, Taiwan and China.With the rapid pace of discovery in astronomy and astrophysics, entirely new perspectives are emerging about dark matter, inflation and the future of the universe. The Power of Stars puts these discoveries in context and describes how they fit into the modern perspective of cosmology, which has arisen from the universal human response to the sky that has inspired both ancient and modern cultures.

This book highlights selected topics of standard and modern theory of accretion onto black holes and magnetized neutron stars. The structure of stationary standard discs and non-stationary viscous processes in accretion discs are discussed to the highest degree of accuracy analytic theory can provide, including relativistic effects in flat and warped discs around black holes. A special chapter is dedicated to a new theory of subsonic settling accretion onto a rotating magnetized neutron star. The book also describes supercritical accretion in quasars and its manifestation in lensing events. Several chapters cover the underlying physics of viscosity in astrophysical discs with some important aspects of turbulent viscosity generation. The book is aimed at specialists as well as graduate students interested in the field of theoretical astrophysics.

This book gathers selected and expanded contributions presented at the 4th Symposium on Space Optical Instruments and Applications, which was held in Delft, the Netherlands, on October 16-18, 2017. This conference series is organized by the Sino-Holland Space Optical Instruments Laboratory, a cooperative platform between China and the Netherlands. The symposium focused on key technological problems regarding optical instruments and their applications in a space context. It covered the latest developments, experiments and results on the theory, instrumentation and applications of space optics. The book is split into five main sections: The first covers optical remote sensing system design, the second focuses on advanced optical system design, and the third addresses remote sensor calibration and measurement. Remote sensing data processing and information extraction are then presented, followed by a final section on remote sensing data applications.

This book presents a study of the saturation of unstable f-modes (fundamental modes) due to low-order nonlinear mode coupling. Since their theoretical prediction in 1934, neutron stars have remained among the most challenging objects in the Universe. Gravitational waves emitted by unstable neutron star oscillations can be used to obtain information about their inner structure, that is, the equation of state of dense nuclear matter. After its initial growth phase, the instability is expected to saturate due to nonlinear effects. The saturation amplitude of the unstable mode determines the detectability of the generated gravitational-wave signal, but also affects the evolution of the neutron star. The study shows that the unstable (parent) mode resonantly couples to pairs of stable (daughter) modes, which drain the parent's energy and make it saturate via a mechanism called parametric resonance instability. Further, it calculates the saturation amplitude of the most unstable f-mode multipoles throughout their so-called instability windows.

This Festschrift dedicated to the 60th birth anniversary of Prof. Sandip K. Chakrabarti, a well-known Indian astrophysicist, presents a collection of contributions by about fifty scientists who work on diverse topics in contemporary astrophysics and space science including new and low-cost balloon borne experiments, planetary science, astrochemistry and the origin of life, ionospheric research and earthquake predictions, relativistic astrophysics around black holes, and finally, the observational signatures and radiative properties of compact objects. All the authors are well known scholars in their respective subject and are all PhD students of Prof. Sandip K. Chakrabarti. The book demonstrates a two-dimensional evolution of research areas triggered by Sandip Chakrabarti over the past few decades. The first dimension represents the evolution and diversification of Chakrabarti's own research in which new students were trained. A second dimension arises from the evolution of the research topics pursued by Chakrabarti's fifty odd doctoral students, many of whom have become renowned scientists in their own right, after starting with a certain subject under Chakrabarti and then migrating to completely new subjects with dexterity. The editors have compiled and edited the articles appropriately to some extent to suit the spirit of this Festschrift on the one hand and to keep balance in diverse topics on the other. Thus this volume also provides an overview for whosoever wishes to enter the important subjects of compact objects, astrochemistry, ionospheric science or space exploration in near space. New graduates, PhD scholars, teachers and researchers will benefit from this volume. Moreover it is a record of tremendous success of a school in a range of vast topics.

This book is devoted to the study of certain integral representations for Neumann, Kapteyn, Schloemilch, Dini and Fourier series of Bessel and other special functions, such as Struve and von Lommel functions. The aim is also to find the coefficients of the Neumann and Kapteyn series, as well as closed-form expressions and summation formulas for the series of Bessel functions considered. Some integral representations are deduced using techniques from the theory of differential equations. The text is aimed at a mathematical audience, including graduate students and those in the scientific community who are interested in a new perspective on Fourier-Bessel series, and their manifold and polyvalent applications, mainly in general classical analysis, applied mathematics and mathematical physics.

In his PhD dissertation Martin Bo Nielsen performs observational studies of rotation in stars like the Sun. The interior rotation in stars is thought to be one of the driving mechanisms of stellar magnetic activity, but until now this mechanism was unconstrained by observational data. NASA's Kepler space mission provides high-precision observations of Sun-like stars which allow rotation to be inferred using two independent methods: asteroseismology measures the rotation of the stellar interior, while the brightness variability caused by features on the stellar surface trace the rotation of its outermost layers. By combining these two techniques Martin Bo Nielsen was able to place upper limits on the variation of rotation with depth in five Sun-like stars. These results suggest that the interior of other Sun-like stars also rotate in much the same way as our own Sun.

This book presents the proceedings of the 2nd Karl Schwarzschild Meeting on Gravitational Physics, focused on the general theme of black holes, gravity and information.Specialists in the field of black hole physics and rising young researchers present the latest findings on the broad topic of black holes, gravity, and information, highlighting its applications to astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and strongly correlated systems.

This book addresses one of the most intriguing mysteries of our universe: the nature of dark matter. The results presented here mark a significant and substantial contribution to the search for new physics, in particular for new particles that couple to dark matter. The first analysis presented is a search for heavy new particles that decay into pairs of hadronic jets (dijets). This pioneering analysis explores unprecedented dijet invariant masses, reaching nearly 7 TeV, and sets constraints on several important new physics models. The two subsequent analyses focus on the difficult low dijet mass region, down to 200 GeV, and employ a novel technique to efficiently gather low-mass dijet events. The results of these analyses transcend the long-standing constraints on dark matter mediator particles set by several existing experiments.

This book uses new data from the very low radio frequency telescope LOFAR to analyse the magnetic structure in the giant radio galaxy NGC6251. This analysis reveals that the magnetic field strength in the locality of this giant radio galaxy is an order of magnitude lower than in other comparable systems. Due to the observational limitations associated with capturing such huge astrophysical structures, giant radio galaxies are historically a poorly sampled population of objects; however, their preferential placement in the more rarefied regions of the cosmic web makes them a uniquely important probe of large-scale structures. In particular, the polarisation of the radio emissions from giant radio galaxies is one of the few tools available to us that can be used to measure magnetic fields in regions where the strength of those fields is a key differentiator for competing models of the origin of cosmic magnetism. Low frequency polarisation data are crucial for detailed analyses of magnetic structure, but they are also the most challenging type of observational data to work with. This book presents a beautifully coupled description of the technical and scientific analysis required to extract valuable information from such data and, as the new generation of low frequency radio telescopes reveals the larger population of giant radio galaxies, it offers a significant resource for future analyses.

The Juno mission to Jupiter is one of the most ambitious, daring and challenging solar system exploration missions ever conceived. Next to the Sun, Jupiter is the largest object in our solar system. As such, it is both a record and driver of the formation and evolution of the planets -- no other object in our solar system can tell us more about the origin of planetary systems. Understanding the details of giant planet formation, structure, composition and powerful magnetospheric environment required a new perspective close up and over the poles of Jupiter -- an orbit never before attempted. Juno was specifically designed for this challenge, entering into the harshest planetary environment known in the solar system. This volume describes the mission design, scientific strategies and instrument payload that enable Juno to peer deep into Jupiter's atmosphere and reveal the fundamental process of the formation and early evolution of our solar system. In these papers, the Juno instrument teams describe their investigations, which include gravity radio science, microwave radiometers, magnetometers, an infrared imager auroral mapper, an ultraviolet imager and spectrograph, a visible light imager known as JunoCam, low and high energy particle detectors and plasma wave and radio electromagnetic sensors. The articles also describe a radiation monitoring experiment and the extensive laboratory measurements undertaken to assist with the analysis and interpretation of Juno's pioneering investigation of Jupiter's deep atmosphere. Originally published in Space Science Reviews, Volume 213, Issue 1-4, November 2017

This monograph traces the development of our understanding of how and where energetic particles are accelerated in the heliosphere and how they may reach the Earth. Detailed data sets are presented which address these topics. The bulk of the observations are from spacecraft in or near the ecliptic plane. It is timely to present this subject now that Voyager-1 has entered the true interstellar medium. Since it seems unlikely that there will be a follow-on to the Voyager programme any time soon, the data we already have regarding the outer heliosphere are not going to be enhanced for at least 40 years.

This book employs computer simulations of 'artificial' Universes to investigate the properties of two popular alternatives to the standard candidates for dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE). It confronts the predictions of theoretical models with observations using a sophisticated semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. Understanding the nature of dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE) are two of the most central problems in modern cosmology. While their important role in the evolution of the Universe has been well established-namely, that DM serves as the building blocks of galaxies, and that DE accelerates the expansion of the Universe-their true nature remains elusive. In the first half, the authors consider 'sterile neutrino' DM, motivated by recent claims that these particles may have finally been detected. Using sophisticated models of galaxy formation, the authors find that future observations of the high redshift Universe and faint dwarf galaxies in the Local Group can place strong constraints on the sterile neutrino scenario. In the second half, the authors propose and test novel numerical algorithms for simulating Universes with a 'modified' theory of gravity, as an alternative explanation to accelerated expansion. The authors' techniques improve the efficiency of these simulations by more than a factor of 20 compared to previous methods, inviting the readers into a new era for precision cosmological tests of gravity.

Featuring Longitudes and Declinations for the Sun, Moon, Planets, Chiron and the Asteroids. The Astrolabe World Ephemeris combines reading ease and clarity with 21st Century accuracy and precision of data. This unique ephemeris is one of the most complete and convenient references available for astrological calculation. Includes: daily longitudes and declinations for the planets calculated to the second of arc, Chiron and the four major asteroids, void-of-course Moon data, 12 hour Moon positions, Monthly planetary and Lunar ingresses, Lunar phases and an introduction by Robert Hand.

The successes of the standard models of particle physics and cosmology are many, but have proven incapable of explaining all the phenomena that we observe. This book investigates the potentially important role of quantum physics, particularly quantum anomalies, in various aspects of modern cosmology, such as inflation, the dynamical generation of the visible and dark matter in the universe, and gravitational waves. By doing so, the authors demonstrate that exploring the links between cosmology and particle physics is key to helping solve the mysteries of our Universe.