In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.

The Physics of Solar and Stellar Coronae provides the first comprehensive summary of the physical processes and phenomena occurring in solar and stellar coronae as observed at X-ray and other wavelengths. The book provides an early summary of the spectacular new solar X-ray observations being obtained with the Yohkoh satellite that are dramatically changing our understanding of the dynamics of the solar corona. With the perspective of two years' observations at X-ray and extreme ultraviolet wavelengths by the ROSAT satellite, many authors present new insights into the basic physical processes occurring in the coronae of stars across the Hertzsprung--Russell Diagram including both pre-main sequence and post-main sequence stars. Detailed models for the hot plasmas typically contained in magnetic loops in both stellar and solar coronae are presented to explain X-ray data obtained with the earlier X-ray instruments on Skylab, SMM, Einstein, and EXOSAT. The book includes papers on coronal observations obtained at other wavelengths and papers of the history of Palermo Astronomical Observatory. The Physics of Solar and Stellar Coronae is intended for researchers in the fields of solar physics and stellar astrophysics and will be a useful resource book for graduate level astrophysics courses. (ABSTRACT) This is the first comprehensive summary of the physical processes and phenomena occurring in solar and stellar coronae. Spectacular new solar X-ray observations by the Yohkoh satellite and stellar observations by ROSAT are highlighted, together with theoretical papers and detailed analyses of earlier data from Skylab, SMM, Einstein, and EXOSAT. Included are papers on coronal observations at other wavelengths and on the history of Palermo Astronomical Observatory.

The conversion of energy generated in the Sun's interior creates its hot corona and a wealth of dynamical phenomena such as flares and mass ejections. Based on recent significant progress in understanding magnetic reconnection and a wealth of new observations of energetic particle signatures from the Sun, the present volume reviews the current theoretical and experimental status in the field. Paying attention to both the details and the broader picture, this book addresses both the experienced researcher as well as nonspecialist researchers from related areas and postgraduate students in astrophsics.

The International Conference, Orbis Scientiae 1996, focused on the topics: The Neutrino Mass, Light Cone Quantization, Monopole Condensation, Dark Matter, and Gravitational Waves which we have adopted as the title of these proceedings. Was there any exciting news at the conference? Maybe, it depends on who answers the question. There was an almost unanimous agreement on the overall success of the conference as was evidenced by the fact that in the after-dinner remarks by one of us (BNK) the suggestion of organizing the conference on a biannual basis was presented but not accepted: the participants wanted the continuation of the tradition to convene annually. We shall, of course, comply. The expected observation of gravitational waves will constitute the most exciting vindication of Einstein's general relativity. This subject is attracting the attention of the experimentalists and theorists alike. We hope that by the first decade of the third millennium or earlier, gravitational waves will be detected, opening the way for a search for gravitons somewhere in the universe, presumably through the observations in the CMBR. The theoretical basis of the graviton search will take us to quantum gravity and eventually to the modification of general relativity to include the Planck scale behavior of gravity -at energies 19 of the order of 10 Ge V.

The reviews and highlights included in this book of proceedings of the plenary sessions, of the Joint European and National Astronomical Meeting (2002), cover some of the major fields and projects which will determine the research in astronomy in the next decades. The highlights have been presented by young astronomers from several European countries, selected from a list of proposals submitted by different institutions across Europe.

This book reflects the multi-disciplinarity and interaction that took place in the meeting. By including reviews on space and ground-based observational programmes, the scientific topics are associated with the new observational efforts in instrumentation. These projects, under development, are expected to drive the research in the coming decades. With such a wide and interdisciplinary coverage this book provides a comprehensive review on the present status and expectations for some of the major fields in astrophysics.

This work is of great relevance for students and researchers alike, as it provides an introductory approach to a wide range of fields in Astronomy, but also includes some detailed reviews for the major topics in each field.

Planetary Aeronomy is a modern and concise introduction to the underlying physical and chemical processes that govern the formation and evolution of the upper atmospheres of planets. The general approach employed permits consideration of the growing number of extrasolar planets, the detailed observation of which will become possible over the next decades. The book explains the physics behind many atmospheric processes, which are relevant for the evolution of planetary atmospheres and their water inventories, and also contains useful scaling laws and analytical expressions that can be applied to any planet. Readers thus gain insight into the evolution of terrestrial planets and their long-time habitability, atmospheric stability, etc. This volume can be used both as graduate textbook for students wishing to specialize in the field as well as succinct compendium for researchers in the field.

The present monograph as well as the next one (Dorman, M2005) is a result of more than 50 years working in cosmic ray (CR) research. After graduation in December 1950 Moscow Lomonosov State University (Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics Division, the Team of Theoretical Physics), my supervisor Professor D. I. Blokhintsev planned for me, as a winner of a Red Diploma, to continue my education as an aspirant (a graduate student) to prepare for Ph. D. in his very secret Object in the framework of what was in those time called the Atomic Problem. To my regret the KGB withheld permission, and I, together with other Jewish students who had graduated Nuclear Divisions of Moscow and Leningrad Universities and Institutes, were faced with a real prospect of being without any work. It was our good fortune that at that time there was being brought into being the new Cosmic Ray Project (what at that time was also very secret, but not as secret as the Atomic Problem), and after some time we were directed to work on this Project. It was organized and headed by Prof. S. N. Vernov (President of All-Union Section of Cosmic Rays) and Prof. N. V. Pushkov (Director of IZMIRAN); Prof. E. L. Feinberg headed the theoretical part of the Project.

The exploration of the first billion years of the history of the Universe represents one of the great challenges of contemporary astrophysics. During this time, the first structures start to form the first stars, galaxies, and possibly also soon the first quasars. At the same time, light comes to the dark, neutral Universe. This book contains the worked out lectures given at the 36th Saas-Fee Advanced Course "First Light in the Universe" by three eminent scientists in the field.

The recent scientific efforts in Astrophysics & Cosmology have brought a revolution to our understanding of the Cosmos. Amazing results is the outcome of amazing experiments! The huge scientific, technological & financial effort that has gone into building the 10-m class telescopes as well as many space and balloon observatories, essential to observe the multitude of cosmic phenomena in their manifestations at different wavelengths, from gamma-rays to the millimetre and the radio, has given and is still giving its fruits of knowledge.
These recent scientific achievements in Observational and Theoretical Cosmology were presented in the "Multiwavelength Cosmology" conference that took place on beautiful Mykonos island in the Aegean between 17 and 20 June 2003. More than 180 Cosmologists from all over the world gathered for a four-day intense meeting in which recent results from large ground based surveys (AAT/2-df, SLOAN) and space missions (WMAP, Chandra, XMM, ISO, HST) were presented and debated, providing a huge impetus to our knowledge of the Cosmos.
The future of the subject (experiments, and directions of research) was also discussed. The conference was devoted mostly on the constraints on Cosmological models and galaxy formation theories that arise from the study of the high redshift Universe, from clusters of galaxies, and their evolution, from the cosmic microwave background, the large-scale structure and star-formation history.

Pulsating and eccentric binary stars play a fundamentally important role in deciphering the mass distribution within stars. The present volume reviews the fundamental concepts of both radial and nonradial oscillations in the stars, including the Sun. Helio- and astroseismological results are reviewed, from the basics to the most recent developments. A new theory is presented, which seems to explain the mechanism of the light and radial velocity variations of recently discovered Ap stars. This textbook covers almost all kinds of variable stars of widely different characteristics. It will serve as a reference text for a very long time to come, not only for specialists but also for undergraduate students of physics and astronomy.

The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to reconstruct the evolution of our changing conceptions of time in the light of scientific discoveries. It will adopt a new perspective and organize the material around three central themes, which run through our history of time reckoning: cosmology and regularity; stasis and flux; symmetry and asymmetry. It is the physical criteria that humans choose - relativistic effects and time-symmetric equations or dynamic-kinematic effects and asymmetric conditions - that establish our views on the nature of time. This book will defend a dynamic rather than a static view of time.

What do we know about the origins of the Universe, and more important, how do we know it? In a small, easy-to-read package, this book introduces you to all of the important ideas about the Big Bang and its consequences. Craig Hogan explains what happened in the early days of the universe, why we think it's expanding (and how the expansion can look the same from everyplace at once), different ways the universe could end, and the meaning of such terms as "cosmic inflation," "cosmic background radiation," and "dark matter." For everyone who has always wondered just what the cosmologists are talking about but could never find the basics explained clearly and simply, this is the book to read.

This textbook provides students with a solid introduction to the techniques of approximation commonly used in data analysis across physics and astronomy. The choice of methods included is based on their usefulness and educational value, their applicability to a broad range of problems and their utility in highlighting key mathematical concepts. Modern astronomy reveals an evolving universe rife with transient sources, mostly discovered - few predicted - in multi-wavelength observations. Our window of observations now includes electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves and neutrinos. For the practicing astronomer, these are highly interdisciplinary developments that pose a novel challenge to be well-versed in astroparticle physics and data-analysis. The book is organized to be largely self-contained, starting from basic concepts and techniques in the formulation of problems and methods of approximation commonly used in computation and numerical analysis. This includes root finding, integration, signal detection algorithms involving the Fourier transform and examples of numerical integration of ordinary differential equations and some illustrative aspects of modern computational implementation. Some of the topics highlighted introduce the reader to selected problems with comments on numerical methods and implementation on modern platforms including CPU-GPU computing. Developed from lectures on mathematical physics in astronomy to advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, this book will be a valuable guide for students and a useful reference for practicing researchers. To aid understanding, exercises are included at the end of each chapter. Furthermore, some of the exercises are tailored to introduce modern symbolic computation.

The 157th IAU Symposium "The Cosmic Dynamo" was entirely dedicated to dynamo processes, which are fundamental to all cosmic scales. Dynamo theory concerns one of the few truly key questions of recent cosmic physics. A complicated interplay of rotation, magnetism and turbulence determines stellar and galactic activity for almost all the short and medium time scales. Behind these multiform phenomena, the cosmic dynamo works in various guises, all involving inductive and dissipative equilibria in rotating turbulent cosmic plasmas. This book presents an up-to-date survey on investigations and results of dynamo theory and related observations. It is intended for graduate scientists working in the field of cosmical magnetism and its related problems, especially convection, turbulence and, more generally, nonlinear physics.

Adaptive optics allows the theoretical limit of angular resolution to be achieved from a large telescope, despite the presence of turbulence. Thus an eight meter class telescope, such as one of the four in the Very Large Telescope operated by ESO in Chile, will in future be routinely capable of an angular resolution of almost 0.01 arcsec, compared tot he present resolution of about 0.5 arcsec for conventional imaging in good condition. All the world's major telescopes either have adaptive optics or are in the process of building AO systems. It turns out that a reasonable fraction of the sky can be observed using adaptive optics, with moderately good imaging quality, provided imaging in done in the near IR. To move out of the near IR, with its relatively poor angular resolution, astronomers need a laser guide star. There is a layer of Na atoms at approximately 90 km altitude that can be excited by a laser to produce such a source, or Rayleigh scattering can be employed lower in the atmosphere. But the production and use of laser guide stars is not trivial, and the key issues determining their successful implementation are discussed here, including the physics of the Na atom, the cone effect, tilt determination, sky coverage, and numerous potential astronomical applications.

Living material contains about twenty different sorts of atom combined into a set of relatively simple molecules. Astrobiologists tend to believe that abiotic mater ial will give rise to life in any place where these molecules exist in appreciable abundances and where physical conditions approximate to those occurring here on Earth. We think this popular view is wrong, for it is not the existence of the building blocks of life that is crucial but the exceedingly complicated structures in which they are arranged in living forms. The probability of arriving at biologically significant arrangements is so very small that only by calling on the resources of the whole universe does there seem to be any possibility of life originating, a conclusion that requires life on the Earth to be a minute component of a universal system. Some think that the hugely improbable transition from non-living to living mat ter can be achieved by dividing the transition into many small steps, calling on a so-called 'evolutionary' process to bridge the small steps one by one. This claim turns on semantic arguments which seek to replace the probability for the whole chain by the sum of the individual probabilities of the many steps, instead of by their product. This is an error well known to those bookies who are accustomed to taking bets on the stacking of horse races. But we did not begin our investigation from this point of view."

It is only since recent years that the importance of the effects of outdoor lighting on the night-time environment and on the physical and mental health of humans is recognized on a wider scale. The related issue of light pollution is a particularly complex one, with potential conflicts of interest between the utilities, environmentalists, astronomers, the lighting industry and various government departments. Energy politics are always a sensitive issue, and light pollution is no exception to this rule.

The effects of light pollution on flora, fauna -including humans and their widely varying night-time activities- are often subtle and need extensive field studies to be quantified in a sensible manner.

The present conference, initiated by Commission 50 of the International Astronomical Union, is an attempt to bring together the astronomical community, the lighting industry, end-users, the utilities, and public authorities for a discussion and an exchange of ideas and information that will create goodwill among these groups and will thus contribute to making the global efforts to reduce pollution more efficient and effective.

Radio frequency pollution was also discussed in the context of radio astronomy and its efforts to create radio-quiet zones in collaboration with the government authorities that allocate frequency bands to the various users -mainly the telecommunications industry- and to protect the major planned and present radio observatories of the world.
The 3-day conference was attended by more than 130 representatives from 12 countries of all the above-mentioned groups, and a wide range of topics was discussed.

Some of the highlights were:
The presentationof the 1st world atlas of artificial night sky brightness (Cinzano et al.); the article by the International Darksky Association on their world-wide efforts to curb light pollution (Alvarez del Castillo et al.); the laws controlling light pollution implemented in Spain (Diaz et al.) and Chile (Sanhueza et al.), an overview of the work on radio frequency protection of sites (Cohen et al.) and the excellent introduction to the topic from the Chilean point of view (Daud).

Related topics in the book are light pollution education, aircraft contrails, space advertising (with an added document provided by the relevant UN commission), and an experiment on involving the population of an entire country in measuring sky brightness, by using the internet and the media.

The text is aimed at professionals from a wide range of disciplines related to lighting and its effects on the night-time environment in the broadest sense of the word. Lay persons interested in this emerging multi-disciplinary field can also find much of interest in this book.

Anyone who doubts that astronomy is enjoying a golden age has only to browse the pages of Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy, Vol. 5. Our golden age is defined not only by the enormity of new discoveries of dark energy, dark matter, extra-solar planets, and the evolution of Mars, but also by the breadth, diversity, and creativity within our community. This volume records our history, in a period of such rapid change and growth that individual astronomers are hard-pressed to keep abreast of their own fields and neighborhoods, much less of developments world-wide. Since the 1950's, changes in the landscape of astronomy are manifold. We have witnessed two epochs of big telescope construction, the 4-meter class telescopes of the '60s and '70s and the 8-to lO-meter class telescopes of the '90s, continuing through today. We accomplished the transition from photographic to digital data, and we continue to improve the size and sen sitivity of astronomical detectors. We have witnessed the flowering of radio astronomy and the opening of the full electromagnetic spectrum through space astronomy. We have seen the growth of national and international astronomy facilities, and a dramatic broadening of the accessibility of data, both through observing facilities available through open competition based on scientific merit and through deep, rich archives of data.

This monograph reports on the recent developments in the area of interplanetary and pre-solar dust grains. Chemical and isotope analyses of dust are discussed, especially with the aim to study the origin and evolution of interplanetary dust. Recent observations of extraterrestrial dust obtained with LDEF, Galileo and Ulysses are presented. Several velocity mechanisms for dust particles are discussed, in addition to their impact on cosmic or cometary dust grain capture devices. This volume is specially intended for research scientists and advanced (graduate) students in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics and geo and cosmochemists. Scientists in related fields, like the environmental sciences (especially researchers of artificial debris from rockets and boosters), are also likely to be interested in this work.

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) began his career at 16 as a human computer under the great mathematician U. J. J. Le Verrier at the Paris Observatory. He soon tired of the drudgery; he was drawn to more romantic vistas, and at 19 wrote a book on an idea that he was to make his own-the habitability of other worlds. There followed a career as France's greatest popularizer of astronomy, with over 60 titles to his credit. An admirer granted him a chateau at Juvisy-sur-l'Orge, and he set up a first-rate observatory dedicated to the study of the planet Mars. Finally, in 1892, he published his masterpiece, La Planete Mars et ses conditions d'habitabilite, a comprehensive summary of three centuries' worth of literature on Mars, much of it based on his own personal research into rare memoirs and archives. As a history of that era, it has never been surpassed, and remains one of a handful of indispensable books on the red planet. Sir Patrick Moore (1923-2012) needs no introduction; his record of popularizing astronomy in Britain in the 20th century equaled Flammarion's in France in the 19th century. Moore pounded out hundreds of books as well as served as presenter of the BBC's TV program "Sky at Night" program for 55 years (a world record). Though Moore always insisted that the Moon was his chef-d'oeuvre, Mars came a close second, and in 1980 he produced a typescript of Flammarion's classic. Unfortunately, even he found the project too daunting for his publish ers and passed the torch of keeping the project alive to a friend, the amateur astronomer and author William Sheehan, in 1993. Widely regarded as a leading historian of the planet Mars, Sheehan has not only meticulously compared and corrected Moore's manuscript against Flammarion's original so as to produce an authoritative text, he has added an important introduction showing the book's significance in the history of Mars studies. Here results a book that remains an invaluable resource and is also a literary tour-de-force, in which the inimitable style of Flammarion has been rendered in the equally unique style of Moore.

In the context of the NASA Deep Impact space mission, comet 9P/Tempel1 has been at the focus of an unprecedented worldwide long-term multi-wavelength observation campaign. The comet was also studied throughout its perihelion passage by various sources including the Deep Impact mission itself, the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer, Rosetta, XMM and all major ground-based observatories in a wavelength band from cm-wave radio astronomy to x-rays.

This book includes the proceedings of a meeting that brought together an audience of theoreticians and observers - across the electromagnetic spectrum and from different sites and projects - to make full use of the massive ground-based observing data set. The coherent presentation of all data sets illustrates and examines the various observational constraints on modelling the cometary nucleus, cometary gas, cometary plasma, cometary dust, and the comet's surface and its activity.

This review of the most up-to-date observational and theoretical information concerning the chemical evolution of the Milky Way compares the abundances derived from field stars and clusters, giving information on the abundances and dynamics of gas.

The stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) is by far the most difficult source of gravitational radiation detect. At the same time, it is the most interesting and intriguing one. This book describes the initial detection of the SGWB and describes the underlying mathematics behind one of the most amazing discoveries of the 21st century. On the experimental side it would mean that interferometric gravitational wave detectors work even better than expected. On the observational side, such a detection could give us information about the very early Universe, information that could not be obtained otherwise. Even negative results and improved upper bounds could put constraints on many cosmological and particle physics models.