Here is a fascinating reader-friendly exploration of "the phosphorus enigma." The volume attempts to answer the questions: How did phosphorus atoms, which are produced inside the inner cores of a handful of huge stars, become concentrated in relatively high proportions in the organisms composing Earth's biosphere? And how did these phosphate derivatives manage to be included in such a great variety of organic molecules playing essential biochemical roles in all known life forms? Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, the volume is arranged in three sections. The first section introduces the fundamental concepts and notions of physics, chemistry, and biology necessary for the proper understanding of the topics discussed within an astronomical framework. The author then focuses on the role of phosphorus and its compounds within the context of chemical evolution in galaxies, considering its relevance in most essential biochemical functions as well as its peculiar chemistry under different physicochemical conditions. The third section provides an overall perspective on the role of phosphorus and its compounds in current areas of research of solid state physics, materials engineering, nanotechnology or medicine.

This monograph discusses cosmological inflation and provides exact and slow roll solutions. It also reviews new and advanced approaches of exact solutions construction with canonical scalar fields, including application of generating functions methods, the superpotential and many others. This book presents the reduction of the Friedmann equation to the Abel equation, which is a very useful tool in cosmology. It offers new solutions and discusses its properties.Additionally, it touches upon the role of phantom scalar field cosmology and analyzes phantonical models. It describes brane cosmology with scalar fields, providing exact solutions construction using the superpotential method as well as Darboux transformations.This book provides detailed calculations throughout.

Dark matter in the Universe has become one of the most exciting and central fields of astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. The lectures and talks in this book emphasize the experimental and theoretical status and perspectives of the ongoing search for dark matter, and the future potential of the field into the next millennium, stressing in particular the interplay between astro- and particle physics.

A self-contained introduction to general relativity that is based on the homogeneity and isotropy of the local universe. Emphasis is placed on estimations of the densities of matter and vacuum energy, and on investigations of the primordial density fluctuations and the nature of dark matter.

The hydrogen Lyman-alpha line is of utmost importance to many fields of astrophysics. This UV line being conveniently redshifted with distance to the visible and even near infrared wavelength ranges, it is observable from the ground, and provides the main observational window on the formation and evolution of high redshift galaxies. Absorbing systems that would otherwise go unnoticed are revealed through the Lyman-alpha forest, Lyman-limit, and damped Lyman-alpha systems, tracing the distribution of baryonic matter on large scales, and its chemical enrichment. We are living an exciting epoch with the advent of new instruments and facilities, on board of satellites and on the ground. Wide field and very sensitive integral field spectrographs are becoming available on the ground, such as MUSE at the ESO VLT. The giant E-ELT and TMT telescopes will foster a quantum leap in sensitivity and both spatial and spectroscopic resolution, to the point of being able, perhaps, to measure directly the acceleration of the Hubble flow. In space, the JWST will open new possibilities to study the Lyman-alpha emission of primordial galaxies in the near infrared. As long as the Hubble Space Telescope will remain available, the UV-restframe properties of nearby galaxies will be accessible to our knowledge. Therefore, this Saas-Fee course appears very timely and should meet the interest of many young researchers.

Modern Cosmology begins with an introduction to the smooth, homogeneous universe described by a Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric, including careful treatments of dark energy, big bang nucleosynthesis, recombination, and dark matter. From this starting point, the reader is introduced to perturbations about an FRW universe: their evolution with the Einstein-Boltzmann equations, their generation by primordial inflation, and their observational consequences. These consequences include the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) featuring acoustic peaks and polarization, the matter power spectrum with baryonic wiggles, and their detection via photometric galaxy surveys, redshift distortions, cluster abundances, and weak lensing. The book concludes with a long chapter on data analysis.
Modern Cosmology is the first book to explain in detail the structure of the acoustic peaks in the CMB, the E/B decomposition in polarization which may allow for detection of primordial gravity waves, and the modern analysis techniques used on increasingly large cosmological data sets. Readers will gain the tools needed to work in cosmology and learn how modern observations are rapidly revolutionizing our picture of the universe.
* Provides foundations, calculations, and interpretations which illuminate current thinking in cosmology
* Covers the major advances in cosmology over the past decade
* Includes over 100 unique, pedagogical figures

Proceedings of the Astrophysics in the Next Decade: JWST and Concurrent Facilities conference.

This professional conference is the "must-attend" meeting to discuss the astrophysics to be enabled by JWST and concurrent facilities during the next decade. This meeting is designed to be of interest and value to the broad astronomical community, who will be preparing science investigations for these facilities.

This meeting, which is hosted by STScI and NASA/GSFC and sponsored by Northrop Grumman, will engage the broad science community in a discussion of science enabled by JWST and concurrent orbital and ground-based facilities. It will describe and stimulate work on the theoretical foundations for astrophysics in the next decade. During 2008, we will produce a reviewed and edited book containing a compilation of the talks and synopses of the discussion periods. We plan that this book will be written in a graduate level pedagogical fashion to yield a reference text of lasting value for astronomers who will be developing investigations for the JWST and other concurrent facilites.

Scientific Organising Committee:
Crystal Brogan, NRAO
Dale Cruikshank, NASA/ARC
Ewine van Dishoeck, Univ. Leiden
Alan Dressler (chair), Carnegie Obs.
Richard Ellis, Caltech
Rob Kennicutt, Cambridge Univ.
Rolf Kudritzki, Univ. Hawaii
Avi Loeb, Harvard
John Mather, NASA/HQ
Yvonne Pendleton, NASA/HQ
Massimo Stiavelli, (JWST SWG liason) STScI
Peter Stockman, (LOC liason) STScI
Leonardo Testi, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (Arceti)
Xander Tielens, NASA/ARC
Meg Urry, Yale
Jeff Valenti, STScI

The aim of the VIRGO investigation (Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations) on SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) is to determine the characteristics of pressure and internal gravity oscillations by observing irradiance and radiance variations, to measure the solar total and spectral irradiance and to quantify their variability over periods of days to the duration of the mission. VIRGO contains two different active-cavity radiometers for monitoring the sol- ar 'constant' (DIARAD and PM06-V), two three-channel sunphotometers (SPM) for the measurement of the spectral irradiance at 402, 500, and 862 nm with a bandwidth of 5 nm, and a low-resolution imager (Luminosity Oscillation Imager, LOI) with 12 'scientific' and 4 guiding pixels, for measuring the radiance dis- tribution over the solar disk: at 500 nm. The instrumentation has been described in detail by Frohlich et al. (1995). In addition, the observed in-flight performance and operational aspects of the irradiance observations are described by Frohlich et al. (1997), and those of the LOI by Appourchaux et al. (1997).

'Each chapter ends with up to six student problems. There is full set of worked answers at the end of the book but modern students might not be enlightened by the samples of Fortran code, probably meant to illustrate how realistic calculations might be made.'Contemporary PhysicsOn a clear and moonless night, especially in remote areas such as deserts, myriads of points of light cover the sky. The great majority of them are stars, many like the Sun, but so far away that they can only be seen as point sources of light. The problem faced by astronomers is to find their properties and distances, just from the light they emit. This is done by using the knowledge of science, mainly physics, acquired from small-scale experiments carried out on Earth. However, the stars themselves are laboratories in which matter behaves in ways that cannot be reproduced on Earth so, in finding out about stars, we complement scientific knowledge gained from earthbound experimentation.This book describes the means - some very ingenious - by which to explore the properties, locations and planetary companions of stars, and provides a sound foundation for further study.

Photopolarimetric remote sensing is vital in fields as diverse as medical diagnostics, astrophysics, atmospheric science, environmental monitoring and military intelligence. The areas considered here include: radiative transfer; dynamic systems; backscatter polarization; biological systems; astrophysical phenomena; comets; and instrumentation. Subtopics include observational information including determining morphology and chemistry, light-scattering models, and characterization methodologies. While this introductory text highlights the latest advances in this multi-disciplinary topic, it is also a reference guide for the advanced researcher.

With a focus on modified gravity this book presents a review of the recent developments in the fields of gravity and cosmology, presenting the state of the art, high-lighting the open problems, and outlining the directions of future research. General Relativity and the CDM framework are currently the standard lore and constitute the concordance paradigm of cosmology. Nevertheless, long-standing open theoretical issues, as well as possible new observational ones arising from the explosive development of cosmology in the last two decades, offer the motivation and lead a large amount of research to be devoted in constructing various extensions and modifications. In this review all extended theories and scenarios are first examined under the light of theoretical consistency, and are then applied in various geometrical backgrounds, such as the cosmological and the spherical symmetric ones. Their predictions at both the background and perturbation levels, and concerning cosmology at early, intermediate and late times, are then confronted with the huge amount of observational data that astrophysics and cosmology has been able to offer in the last two decades. Theories, scenarios and models that successfully and efficiently pass the above steps are classified as viable and are candidates for the description of Nature, allowing readers to get a clear overview of the state of the art and where the field of modified gravity is likely to go. This work was performed in the framework of the COST European Action "Cosmology and Astrophysics Network for Theoretical Advances and Training Actions" - CANTATA.

Emission line stars are attractive to many people because of their spectacular phenomena and their amazing varieties and variability. This book offers general information on emission line stars, starting from a brief introduction to stellar astrophysics and then moving to a broad overview of emission line stars including early and late type stars as well as pre-main sequence stars.

The aim of the inaugural meeting of the Sant Cugat Forum on Astrophysics was to address, in a global context, the current understanding of and challenges in high-energy emissions from isolated and non-isolated neutron stars, and to confront the theoretical picture with observations of both the Fermi satellite and the currently operating ground-based Cherenkov telescopes. Participants have also discussed the prospects for possible observations with planned instruments across the multi-wavelength spectrum (e.g. SKA, LOFAR, E-VLT, IXO, CTA) and how they will impact our theoretical understanding of these systems.
In keeping with the goals of the Forum, this book not only represents the proceedings of the meeting, but also a reflection on the state-of-the-art in the topic.

Effective field theories have been widely used in nuclear physics. This volume is devoted to exploring the intricate structure of compact-star matter inaccessible directly from QCD. It is principally anchored on hidden symmetries and topology presumed to be encoded in QCD. It differs from standard effective field theory and energy density functional approaches in that it exploits renormalization-group flow in the complex 'vacuum' sliding with density inferred from topology change identified as a manifestation of baryon-quark continuity in dense matter. It makes a variety of predictions that drastically differ from the conventional treatments that could be tested by upcoming terrestrial and astrophysical experiments.This monograph recounts how to go, in one unique field theoretic formalism in terms of hadronic degrees of freedom, from finite nuclei to dense compact-star matter that could be explored in RIB-type machines in nuclear physics as well as in LIGO-type gravity waves in astrophysics.

Ground- or space-based telescopes are becoming increasingly more complex and construction budgets are typically in the billion dollar range. Facing costs of this magnitude, availability of engineering tools for prediction of performance and design optimization is imperative. Establishment of simulation models combining different technical disciplines such as Structural Dynamics, Control Engineering, Optics and Thermal Engineering is indispensable. Such models are normally called Integrated Models because they involve many different disciplines. The models will play an increasingly larger role for design of future interdisciplinary optical systems in space or on ground. The book concentrates on integrated modeling of optical and radio telescopes but the techniques presented will be applicable to a large variety of systems. Hence, the book will be of interest to optical and radio telescope designers, designers of spacecrafts that include optical systems, and to designers of various complex defense systems. The book may also find use as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses within the field. "Adaptive Optics" is an exciting and relatively new field, originally dedicated to correction for blurring when imaging through the atmosphere. Although this objective is still of high importance, the concept of Adaptive Optics has recently evolved further. Today, the objective is not only to correct for atmospheric turbulence effects but also for a range of static and dynamical telescope aberrations. The notion of adaptive optics has expanded to the field of "Wavefront Control", correcting for a variety of system aberrations. Wavefront control systems maintain form and position of optical elements with high precision under static and dynamical load. In many ways, such systems replace the steel structures of traditional optical systems, thereby providing much lighter systems with a performance not possible before. Integrated Modeling is the foremost tool for studies of Wavefront Control for telescopes and complex optics and is therefore now of high importance. Springer has recently published two books on telescopes, "Reflecting Telescope Optics" by R. Wilson, and "The Design and Construction of Large Optical Telescopes" by P. Bely. Noting that a new (and expensive) generation of Extremely Large Telescopes with apertures in the 30-100 m range is on the way, the present book on integrated modeling is a good match to the existing books and an appropriate specialization and continuation of some subjects dealt with in those books.

• Introduces the exciting field of astrobiology and investigates the prospects for direct and indirect interactions with extraterrestrial life. • Contains worked example problems, thought questions for self-study, and a “Going Further” section for readers wishing to dig deeper. • Emphasizes an intuitive understanding, together with discussion of scientific methods and technology for applying intuition to real problems. • Features lab exercises, plenty of figures and diagrams, and several appendices for easy reference to key information. • Includes a final chapter on science fiction, discussing coverage of astrobiology in modern books and films, from “Star Trek” to “Interstellar.”

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.

Interstellar dust grains catalyse chemical reactions, absorb, scatter, polarise and re-radiate starlight and constitute the building blocks for the formation of planets. Understanding this interstellar component is therefore of primary importance in many areas of astronomy & astrophysics. For example, observers need to understand how dust effects light passing through molecular clouds. Astrophysicists wish to comprehend how dust enables the collapse of clouds or how it determines the spectral behaviour of protostars, star forming regions or whole galaxies. This book gives a thorough theoretical description of the fundamental physics of interstellar dust: its composition, morphology, size distribution, dynamics, optical and thermal properties, alignment, polarisation, scattering, radiation and spectral features. This encyclopedic book provides the basic physics towards understanding the solid matter in interstellar space. It includes all the necessary physics, including solid state physics, radiative transport, optical properties, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. It then uses all of this basic physics in the specific case of dust grains in the interstellar medium. Interstellar dust clouds catalyze simple chemical reactions, absorbs, scatters, polarizes and re-radiates starlight and forms the building blocks for planet and stellar formation. Understanding this interstellar medium is then of primary importance in many areas of astronomy & astrophysics. For example observers need to understand how it effects light passing through dust and molecular clouds, astrophysicists need to comprehend the formation and structure of dust clouds and how it collapses to form stars and planets. Written in an accessible and descriptive manner, this will be essential supplementary reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on the interstellar medium and active researchers in need of a single source of well illustrated and detailed information.

The SECCHI A and B instrument suites (Howard et al. , 2006) onboard the two STEREO mission spacecraft (Kaiser, 2005) are each composed of: one Extreme Ultra-Violet Imager (EUVI), two white-light coronagraphs (COR1 and COR2), and two wide-angle heliospheric imagers (HI1 and HI2). Technical descriptions of EUVI, COR1 and the HIs can be found in Wuelser et al. (2004), Thompson et al. (2003), and De?se et al. (2003), respectively. The images produced by SECCHI represent a data visualization challenge: i) the images are 2048x2048 pixels (except for the HIs, which are usually binned onboard 2x2), thus the vast majority of computer displays are not able to display them at full frame and full r- olution, and ii) more importantly, the ?ve instruments of SECCHI A and B were designed to be able to track Coronal Mass Ejections from their onset (with EUVI) to their pro- gation in the heliosphere (with the HIs), which implies that a set of SECCHI images that covers the propagation of a CME from its initiation site to the Earth is composed of im- ?1 ages with very different spatial resolutions - from 1. 7 arcsecondspixel for EUVI to 2. 15 ?1 arcminutespixel for HI2, i. e. 75 times larger. A similar situation exists with the angular scales of the physical objects, since the size of a CME varies by orders of magnitude as it expands in the heliosphere.

A conference on "Observational Evidence for Black Holes in the Universe" was held in Calcutta during January 10-17, 1998. This was the first time that experts had gathered to debate and discuss topics such as: Should black holes exist?; If so, how to detect them?; And Have we found them? This book is the essence of this gathering. Black holes are enigmatic objects since it is impossible to locate them through direct observations. State-of-the-art theoretical works and numerical simulations have given us enough clues of what to look for. Observations, from both ground and space-based missions, have been able to find these tell-tale signatures. This book is a compendium of our present knowledge about these theories and observations at the end of the 20th century. Combined, they give an idea of whether black holes, galactic as well as extragalactic, have been detected or not.

A concise introduction to the greatest questions of modern cosmology. What came before the big bang? How will the universe evolve into the future? Will there be a big crunch? Questions like these have no definitive answers, but there are many contending theories. In A Little Book about the Big Bang, physicist and writer Tony Rothman guides expert and uninitiated readers alike through the most compelling mysteries surrounding the nature and origin of the universe. Cosmologists are busy these days, actively researching dark energy, dark matter, and quantum gravity, all at the foundation of our understanding of space, time, and the laws governing the universe. Enlisting thoughtful analogies and a step-by-step approach, Rothman breaks down what is known and what isn't and details the pioneering experimental techniques scientists are bringing to bear on riddles of nature at once utterly basic and stunningly complex. In Rothman's telling, modern cosmology proves to be an intricate web of theoretical predictions confirmed by exquisitely precise observations, all of which make the theory of the big bang one of the most solid edifices ever constructed in the history of science. At the same time, Rothman is careful to distinguish established physics from speculation, and in doing so highlights current controversies and avenues of future exploration. The idea of the big bang is now almost a century old, yet with each new year comes a fresh enigma. That is scientific progress in a nutshell: every groundbreaking discovery, every creative explanation, provokes new and more fundamental questions. Rothman takes stock of what we have learned and encourages readers to ponder the mysteries to come.

Searching for Dark Matter with Cosmic Gamma Rays summarizes the evidence for dark matter and what we can learn about its particle nature using cosmic gamma rays. It has almost been 100 years since Fritz Zwicky first detected hints that most of the matter in the Universe that doesn't directly emit or reflect light. Since then, the observational evidence for dark matter has continued to grow. Dark matter may be a new kind of particle that is governed by physics beyond our Standard Model of particle physics. In many models, dark matter annihilation or decay produces gamma rays. There are a variety of instruments observing the gamma-ray sky from tens of MeV to hundreds of TeV. Some make deep, focused observations of small regions, while others provide coverage of the entire sky. Each experiment offers complementary sensitivity to dark matter searches in a variety of target sizes, locations, and dark matter mass scales. We review results from recent gamma-ray experiments including anomalies some have attributed to dark matter. We also discuss how our gamma-ray observations complement other dark matter searches and the prospects for future experiments.

'The book can be a good introduction to research in the area of black hole physics. Also, it can serve as a source book for the established researcher in the field. The book contains an extensive bibliography the contents of which are amply cited throughout the text. The book well documents the historical development of the theory of Hawking radiation and related topics. The book is a worthwhile addition to the physics literature on a topic of considerable interest.'zbMATH]The aim of this book is to provide the reader with a guide to Hawking radiation through a dual approach to the problem. After an introductory chapter containing some basic knowledge about black holes and quantum field theory in curved spacetime, the first part of the book consists in a survey of methods for deriving and studying Hawking radiation from astrophysical black holes, from the original calculation by S W Hawking to the most recent contributions involving tunneling and gravitational anomalies. In the second part, we introduce analogue gravity, and we focus our attention to dielectric black hole systems, to which the studies of the present authors are devoted. The mutual interchange of knowledge between the aforementioned parts is addressed to render a more comprehensive picture of this very fascinating quantum phenomenon associated with black holes.

This textbook treats Celestial Mechanics as well as Stellar Dynamics from the common point of view of orbit theory making use of the concepts and techniques from modern geometric mechanics. It starts with elementary Newtonian Mechanics and ends with the dynamics of chaotic motions. The book is meant for students in astronomy and physics alike. Prerequisite is a physicist's knowledge of calculus and differential geometry. Volume 1 begins with classical mechanics and a thorough treatment of the 2-body problem, including regularization, followed by an introduction to the N-body problem with particular attention given to the virial theorem. Then the authors discuss all important non-perturbative aspects of the 3-body problem. A final chapter deals with integrability of Hamilton-Jacobi systems.

The two years previous to 1997 have produced some of the most exciting results in the history of astronomy: the indirect detection of planets beyond our solar system. The study of the characteristics and physical nature of exo-planets requires an infrared interferometer in space. Such observatory would directly detect the thermal emission from exo-planets and would allow us to see signatures of molecules, such as water, ozone and carbon dioxide, in their atmospheres. The presence of such molecules would be strong evidence for exo-life. In addition, this kind of instrument would help to clarify important questions concerning the birth and death of stars and extragalactic astronomy. In Toledo, scientists and engineers from both sides of the Atlantic met to discuss the technological challenges of an infrared space interferometer and its scientific capabilities, particularly those related to exo-planetary systems and Earth-like planets.