This thesis describes the studies on the solar interior where turbulent thermal convection plays an important role. The author solved, for the first time, one of the long-standing issues in solar physics, i.e., the maintenance mechanism of the solar differential rotation in the near-surface shear layer. The author attacked this problem with a newly developed approach, the reduced speed of sound technique, which enabled him to investigate the surface and deep solar layers in a self-consistent manner. This technique also made it possible to achieve an unprecedented performance in the solar convection simulations for the usage of the massively parallel supercomputers such as the RIKEN K system. It was found that the turbulence and the mean flows such as the differential rotation and the meridional circulation mutually interact with each other to maintain the flow structures in the Sun. Recent observations by helioseismology support the author's proposed theoretical mechanism. The book also addresses the generation of the magnetic field in such turbulent convective motions, which is an important step forward for solar cyclic dynamo research.

The Magnetosheath and Magnetotail of Venus.- The Structure of the Venus Ionosphere.- Ion Dynamics in the Venus Ionosphere.- Magnetic Fields in the Ionosphere of Venus.- Plasma Waves at Venus.- Venus Lightning.- The Structure, Luminosity and Dynamics of the Venus Atmosphere.

Published over a period of 20 years the essays collected together in this volume all relate to the lasting human preoccupation with cosmological matters and modern responses to them. The eclecticism of the typical medieval scholar might now seem astonishing, regrettable, amusing, or derisory, according to one's view of how rigid intellectual barriers should be. In Stars, Fate & Mind North argues that we will seriously misunderstand ancient and medieval thought if we are not prepared to share a willingness to look across such frontiers as those dividing astrology from ecclesiastical history, biblical chronology from astronomy, and angelic hierarchies from the planetary spheres, theology from the theory of the continuum, celestial laws from terrestrial, or the work of the clockmaker from the work of God himself, namely the universe. Surveying the work of such controversial scholars as Alexander Thom and Immanuel Velikovsky this varied volume brings together current scholarship on cosmology, and as the title suggest considers the confluence of matters of the stars, fate and the mind. The collection is accompanied by further commentary from the author and new illustrations.

Recent discoveries of planet-like objects circling other sun-like stars have stirred enormous interest in what other planets may exist in the universe, and whether they could support intelligent life. This book takes us into the midst of this search for extrasolar planets. Unlike other books, it focuses on the people behind the searches -- many known personally by the author -- and the extraordinary technology that is currently on the drawing boards. The author is an experienced, award-winning science journalist who was previously technology correspondent for the Financial Times of London. He has written on many topics in astronomy and astrobiology in over 35 different newspapers and magazines worldwide.

Today many scientists recognize plasma as the key element in understanding new observations in interplanetary and interstellar space, in stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and throughout the observable universe. Plasma astrophysics and cosmology, as a unified discipline, cover topics such as the large-scale structure and filamentation of the universe; the microwave background; the formation of galaxies and magnetic fields; active galactic nuclei and quasars; the origin and abundance of light elements; star formation and the evolution of solar systems; redshift periodicities and anomalous redshifts; general relativity; electric fields; the acceleration of charged particles to high energies; and cosmic rays. This text provides an update on the observations made in radio, optical and high-energy astrophysics, especially since 1985, and addresses the paradigm changing discoveries made by the planetary probes and satellites, radio telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope. Over 20 contributors, all distinguished plasma scientists, present a picture of the nature of our plasma universe with articles ranging from the popular level to advanced topics in plasma cosmology.

Every rock has a story tell, and none more so than those which have fallen from the sky: meteorites. Originating in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, these rocky fragments offer clues not just to the earliest origins of the Solar System but also to Earth's very survival into the future. Sky at Night presenter, Dr Tim Gregory takes us on a journey through the very earliest days of our Solar System to the spectacular meteorite falls that produced 'fiery rain' in 1792, to the pre-solar grains (literally stardust) that were blown in from other solar systems and are the oldest solid objects ever discovered on earth. Meteorites reveal a story much bigger than ourselves or our planet. As Tim says, 'it is an epic beyond compare'.

Developments in the interrelated industries surrounding air transportation and space exploitation continue to give rise to new and challenging problems in international law. As more and more countries and private entities use outer space for satellite-based systems of air navigation, telecommunications, and surveillance, significant economic and environmental issues loom ever larger. Moreover, the ongoing exploration of space and celestial bodies in search of commercial possibilities poses new questions, ranging in substance from the proliferation of space debris to intellectual property rights. The Warsaw System of intercarrier liability, although still serviceable, is severely strained by such developments as the products liability of aircraft and satellite manufacturers and the liability involved in the construction and launching of space stations and multipurpose satellites. Aware of the massive convergence of these legal and political challenges, over 200 air and space experts - from the airlines and aerospace industries, from law practice and law faculties, and from civil aviation authorities at national, regional, and international levels - met in Seoul, in June 1997, to search for solutions and to promote and strengthen international co-operation in this crucial sphere. Twenty-three countries were represented. This book is the record of their presentations, discussions, recommendations, and conclusions. The many specific issues and topics raised and analyzed include the phenomenon of trade in launch services; the interdependence of military and satellite systems; new remote sensing technologies and the challenges they present to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967; new airports; the transfer of air traffic control functions; the transnational co-production of aircraft; regional and bilateral air transport agreements; and a great deal more. Numerous cases from a variety of jurisdictions are cited, so that the reader may gain a sense of jurisprudential trends in air and space law as we proceed into the 21st Century.

The zeta Aurigae stars are the rare but illustrious sub-group of binary stars that undergo the dramatic phenomenon of "chromospheric eclipse". This book provides detailed descriptions of the ten known systems, illustrates them richly with examples of new spectra, and places them in the context of stellar structure and evolution. Comprised of a large cool giant plus a small hot dwarf, these key eclipsing binaries reveal fascinating changes in their spectra very close to total eclipse, when the hot star shines through differing heights of the "chromosphere", or outer atmosphere, of the giant star. The phenomenon provides astrophysics with the means of analyzing the outer atmosphere of a giant star and how that material is shed into space. The physics of these critical events can be explained qualitatively, but it is more challenging to extract hard facts from the observations, and tough to model the chromosphere in any detail. The book offers current thinking on mechanisms for heating a star's chromosphere and on how a star loses mass, and relates this science synergistically to studies of other stars and binaries, and to the increasing relevance of contributions from new techniques in interferometry and asteroseismology. It also includes a detailed discussion of the enigmatic star epsilon Aurigae, which had recently undergone one of its very infrequent and very baffling eclipses. Though not a zeta Aurigae system, epsilon Aurigae is a true "Giant" among eclipsing stars. The 7 chapters of this book, written by a group of experts, have been carefully edited to form a coherent volume that offers a thorough overview of the subject to both professional and student.

This book contains the elaborated and updated versions of the 24 lectures given at the 43rd Saas-Fee Advanced Course. Written by four eminent scientists in the field, the book reviews the physical processes related to star formation, starting from cosmological down to galactic scales. It presents a detailed description of the interstellar medium and its link with the star formation. And it describes the main numerical computational techniques designed to solve the equations governing self-gravitating fluids used for modelling of galactic and extra-galactic systems. This book provides a unique framework which is needed to develop and improve the simulation techniques designed for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. Presented in an accessible manner it contains the present day state of knowledge of the field. It serves as an entry point and key reference to students and researchers in astronomy, cosmology, and physics.

From the bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds takes us to the frontiers of scientific knowledge to explain the extraordinary nature - and future - of our universe. Imagine a future where we are not alone - where our universe is just one of countless parallel worlds, some strangely familiar, some almost unimaginable. And that, when planet earth finally runs down to a cold, dark wasteland, we will be able to escape into these new worlds and start again. Michio Kaku's thrilling guide to the galaxy shows us how it could happen sooner than we think - and the future for intelligent life is one of endless possibilities. 'This book is absolutely impossible to put down ... if and when we do find out what the universe is, and how it was created, it's going to be absolutely mind-blowing' Independent on Sunday 'One of the gurus of modern physics' Financial Times 'An exhilarating read ... nobody who reads this book can be anything less than amazed by the possibilities it presents' Scotland on Sunday 'The journey he takes the reader on is so picturesque and the conclusions so startling that you are gripped' Sunday Telegraph Michio Kaku is a leading theoretical physicist and one of the founders of string theory, widely regarded as the strongest candidate for the 'theory of everything'. He is also one of the most gifted popularizers of science of his generation. His books published by Penguin include Parallel Worlds, The Physics of the Future and The Physics of the Impossible. He holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, where he has taught for over twenty-five years.

Modern research has demonstrated that many stars are surrounded by planets-some of which might contain the right conditions to harbor life. This has only reinforced a question that has been tormenting scientists, philosophers and priests since Antiquity: Are there other inhabited worlds beyond our own? This book analyzes the many ways that humans have argued for and depicted extraterrestrial life over the centuries. The first known texts about the subject date from as early as the 6th century BC. Since that time, countless well-known historical characters like Lucretius, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Cusanus, Bruno, Kepler, Descartes, and Huygens contributed to the debate; here, their lesser known opinions on the subject are studied in detail. It is often difficult for the modern mind to follow the thinking of our ancestors, which can only be understood when placed in the relevant context. The book thus extends its scope to the evolution of ideas about cosmology in general, as well as the culture in which these great thinkers wrote. The research is presented with the author's insights and humor, making this an easy and enjoyable read.

In this symposium on Wolf-Rayet stars, binary aspects received ample attention, notably because of the recognition that many observations of spectral and photometric variability at all accessible wavelengths are related to colliding winds or other forms of wind interaction. The basic structure of the conference and its proceedings is: basic parameters and general properties of WR stars; state of the art model atmospheres for WR stars, anisotropic mass loss and disk formation of WR stars, properties of WR binaries; influence of stellar winds on mass transfer in hot massive binary evolution; dust formation near WR stars and other circumstellar phenomena; and hydrodynamics and high-energy physics of colliding winds in WR+O binaries and of WR winds interacting with compact objects. Within this framework 20 invited reviews, 38 invited oral contributions, and 76 poster papers were presented at the Symposium, entertaining 111 astronomers from 24 countries. These proceedings provide up-to-date information on all aspects of Wolf-Rayet atmospheres, binaries, and colliding winds.

Where do most stars (and the planetary systems that surround them) in the Milky Way form? What determines whether a young star cluster remains bound (such as an open or globular cluster), or disperses to join the field stars in the disc of the Galaxy? These questions not only impact understanding of the origins of stars and planetary systems like our own (and the potential for life to emerge that they represent), but also galaxy formation and evolution, and ultimately the story of star formation over cosmic time in the Universe. This volume will help readers understand our current views concerning the answers to these questions as well as frame new questions that will be answered by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite that was launched in late 2013. The book contains the elaborated notes of lectures given at the 42nd Saas-Fee Advanced Course "Dynamics of Young Star Clusters & Associations" by Cathie Clarke (University of Cambridge) who presents the theory of star formation and dynamical evolution of stellar systems, Robert Mathieu (University of Wisconsin) who discusses the kinematics of star clusters and associations, and I. Neill Reid (S pace Telescope Science Institute) who provides an overview of the stellar populations in the Milky Way and speculates on from whence came the Sun. As part of the Saas-Fee Advanced Course Series, the book offers an in-depth introduction to the field serving as a starting point for Ph.D. research and as a reference work for professional astrophysicists.

The detection of radial and non-radial solar-like oscillations in thousands of G-K giants with CoRoT and Kepler is paving the road for detailed studies of stellar populations in the Galaxy. The available average seismic constraints allow largely model-independent determination of stellar radii and masses, and can be used to determine the position and age of thousands of stars in different regions of the Milky Way, and of giants belonging to open clusters. Such a close connection between stellar evolution, Galactic evolution, and asteroseismology opens a new very promising gate in our understanding of stars and galaxies. This book represents a natural progression from the collection of review papers presented in the book 'Red Giants as Probes of the Structure and Evolution of the Milky Way', which appeared in the Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings series in 2012. This sequel volume contains review papers on spectroscopy, seismology of red giants, open questions in Galactic astrophysics, and discusses first results achieved by combining photometric/spectroscopic and seismic constraints on populations of stars observed by CoRoT and Kepler. The book also reports on discussions between expert researchers in Galactic evolution, specialists in stellar structure and asteroseismology, and key representatives of extensive ground-based spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE and the ESO-GAIA Spectroscopic Survey, which would serve as a roadmap for future endeavours in this field of research.

A major fraction of star formation in the universe occurs in starbursts. These regions of particularly rapid star formation are often located towards the centers of host galaxies. Studies of this kind of star formation at high redshift have produced astonishing results over recent years that were only possible with the latest generation of large ground-based and space telescopes. The papers collected in this volume present these results in the context of the much firmer foundation of star formation in the local universe, and they emphasize all the important topics, from star formation in different environments to the cosmic star formation history.

With the onset of massive cosmological data collection through media such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), galaxy classification has been accomplished for the most part with the help of citizen science communities like Galaxy Zoo. Seeking the wisdom of the crowd for such Big Data processing has proved extremely beneficial. However, an analysis of one of the Galaxy Zoo morphological classification data sets has shown that a significant majority of all classified galaxies are labelled as Uncertain .

This book reports on how to use data mining, more specifically clustering, to identify galaxies that the public has shown some degree of uncertainty for as to whether they belong to one morphology type or another. The book shows the importance of transitions between different data mining techniques in an insightful workflow. It demonstrates that Clustering enables to identify discriminating features in the analysed data sets, adopting a novel feature selection algorithms called Incremental Feature Selection (IFS). The book shows the use of state-of-the-art classification techniques, Random Forests and Support Vector Machines to validate the acquired results. It is concluded that a vast majority of these galaxies are, in fact, of spiral morphology with a small subset potentially consisting of stars, elliptical galaxies or galaxies of other morphological variants."

This volume is a compilation of the research presented at the International Asteroid Day workshop which was celebrated at Barcelona on June 30th, 2015. The proceedings discuss the beginning of a new era in the study and exploration of the solar system's minor bodies. International Asteroid Day commemorates the Tunguska event of June 30th, 1908. The workshop's goal was to promote the importance of dealing proactively with impact hazards from space. Multidisciplinary experts contributed to this discussion by describing the nature of comets and asteroids along with their offspring, meteoroids. New missions to return material samples of asteroids back to Earth such as Osiris-REx and Hayabusa 2, as well as projects like AIM and DART which will test impact deflection techniques for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids encounters were also covered. The proceedings include both an outreach level to popularize impact hazards and a scientific character which covers the latest knowledge on these topics, as well as offering proposals of promising new techniques that will help gain new insights of the properties of these challenging bodies by studying meteoroids and meteorites. Asteroids, comets, meteoroids and meteorites are introduced with descriptions of their nature, origin, and solar system pathways.

This is a follow-on book to the introductory textbook "Physics of the Solar Corona" previously published in 2004 by the same author, which provided a systematic introduction and covered mostly scientific results from the pre-2000 era. Using a similar structure as the previous book the second volume provides a seamless continuation of numerous novel research results in solar physics that emerged in the new millennium (after 2000) from the new solar missions of RHESSI, STEREO, Hinode, CORONAS, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) during the era of 2000-2018. The new solar space missions are characterized by unprecedented high-resolution imaging, time resolution, spectral capabilities, stereoscopy and tomography, which reveal the intricate dynamics of magneto-hydrodynamic processes in the solar corona down to scales of 100 km. The enormous amount of data streaming down from SDO in Terabytes per day requires advanced automated data processing methods. The book focuses exclusively on new research results after 2000, which are reviewed in a comprehensive manner, documented by over 3600 literature references, covering theory, observations, and numerical modeling of basic physical processes that are observed in high-temperature plasmas of the Sun and other astrophysical objects, such as plasma instabilities, coronal heating, magnetic reconnection processes, coronal mass ejections, plasma waves and oscillations, or particle acceleration.

First Snow White encounters one of the Little People, then one of the Even Smaller People, and finally one of the Truly Infinitesimal People. And no matter how diligently she searches, the only dwarves she can find are collapsed stars! Clearly, she's not at home in her well-known Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but instead in a strange new landscape that features quantum behavior, the wavelike properties of particles, and the Uncertainty Principle. She (and we) must have entered, in short, one of the worlds created by Robert Gilmore, physicist and fabulist.

Interstellar and solar system solids are different stages of the same materials. In this book, the sources and evolution of circumstellar dust, interstellar dust, comets, meteorites and interplanetary dust are carefully discussed in the context of their interrelations. One of the major questions raised is: how do characteristically 1/10 micron interstellar dust particles evolve to rocky materials 1000 times larger or more? The closest we appear to be getting in relating interstellar dust to particles in the solar system is the evidence for submicron organic coated particles in interplanetary dust particles collected in the upper atmosphere, which allow direct laboratory investigation on Earth. What we know about comets, however, either results from remote observation or space measurements in situ. Comet volatiles compare very well with interstellar ices. These astrophysical problems bring to bear a very wide range of theoretical, observational and laboratory expertise in such fields as astronomy, physics and chemistry and, with the evidence of complex prebiotic organics in meteorites.

"Experiments in Reduced Gravity: Sediment Settling on Mars" is the first book to be published that reflects experiments conducted on Martian geomorphology in reduced gravity.

This brief yet important book on sediment experiments assesses the theoretical and empirical foundation of the models used to analyze the increasing information we have on the past geography on Mars. The book also evaluates the need to develop new methods for analyzing new information by providing a conceptual outline and a case study on how experiments can be used to test current theoretical considerations. The conceptual approach to identifying the need for and role of experiments will be of interest to planetary scientists and geoscientists not necessarily involved with Mars, but those using experiments in their research who can apply the book s concepts.
Includes figures, diagrams, illustrations, and photographs to vividly explore experiments and outcomes in reduced gravityProvides an outline of planned experiments and questions related to Martian geomorphologyFeatures results from the MarsSedEx 1 Experiment in 2012"