Take a look through the lens and discover the beauty and science of the magnificent night sky - and beyond!

This stunningly-illustrated space book is split into eight sections that cover every aspect of astronomy. Learn about the history of discoveries in the field and astronomical phenomena, from the earliest human civilizations to the present day, and then take a lavish visual tour of the Solar System, complete with the most spectacular photographs of the planets.

A magnificent month-by-month guide to the night sky, with profiles of all 88 constellations, over 100 star charts covering both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and an almanac of astronomical events over the next decade, Astronomy: A Visual Guide will help you to navigate your way around the night sky, and locate stars, galaxies, and other objects.

Soar into the pages of this spectacular space book to reveal:

• All 88 constellations with over 100 star charts and a guide to the latest space-observing equipment.
• Groundbreaking discoveries and the most awe-inspiring images of the universe.
• Written by Ian Ridpath, the editor of Norton's Star Atlas.
• Includes a 10-year calendar of celestial events such as eclipses and comet appearances.

Also featuring no-nonsense advice on how to observe the skies using the naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes, Astronomy: A Visual Guide is the perfect guide for keen amateur astronomers, as well as a great reference book for the whole family.

The Cosmos Explained is an exciting and beautifully designed book that charts the life of our universe from the Big Bang to the present day and beyond. Starting with the moment of the Big Bang-at exactly one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second-this book charts a history of space and time all the way through the evolution of our solar system, the birth of stars and the formation of life on Earth, to the future of our galaxy and beyond. With deeply insightful and fascinating text by Hayden Planetarium Associate Professor Charles Liu, who also hosts the immensely popular StarTalk podcast, this book is an accessible and enthralling gateway into the mysteries of space, time and the universe. Pinpoint exactly where you are in space and time using the timeline at the bottom of every page, and explore the history of the cosmos and the science behind it through beautiful telescope images and striking illustrations. Packaged in a unique retro design that reflects the 1960s cosmonaut era but still feels modern and relevant today, this title is as rich with information as it is with stunning visualisations of the concepts and bodies detailed within. An ideal gift for anyone interested in space or curious about the cosmos, The Cosmos Explained is a unique and entertaining timeline of life, the universe, and everything!

A pocket-style edition based on the New York Times bestseller A Brief Welcome to the Universe offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos, from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes and time loops. Bestselling authors and acclaimed astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott take readers on an unforgettable journey of exploration to reveal how our universe actually works. Propelling you from our home solar system to the outermost frontiers of space, this book builds your cosmic insight and perspective through a marvelously entertaining narrative. How do stars live and die? What are the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? How did the universe begin? Why is it expanding and accelerating? Is our universe alone or part of an infinite multiverse? Exploring these and many other questions, this pocket-friendly book is your passport into the wonders of our evolving cosmos.

This book addresses the mechanism of enrichment of heavy elements in galaxies, a long standing problem in astronomy. It mainly focuses on explaining the origin of heavy elements by performing state-of-the-art, high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of dwarf galaxies. In this book, the author successfully develops a model of galactic chemodynamical evolution by means of which the neutron star mergers can be used to explain the observed abundance pattern of the heavy elements synthesized by the rapid neutron capture process, such as europium, gold, and uranium in the Local Group dwarf galaxies. The book argues that heavy elements are significant indicators of the evolutionary history of the early galaxies, and presents theoretical findings that open new avenues to understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies based on the abundance of heavy elements in metal-poor stars.

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 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.

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.

This book presents a complete overview of what we know, and would like to know, about the evolution and structure of massive stars. The spectra of early-type stars are produced by elaborate model atmospheres enveloping the internal structure. The book should be of value to researchers into the evolution, structure and atmospheres of massive stars. The book is also appropriate for astrophysics courses at university level, where it can be used to get acquainted with the most recent observational data, modelling of the internal and atmospheric structure, and the refined development of single and binary evolution scenarios of massive stars.

This thesis presents a pioneering method for gleaning the maximum information from the deepest images of the far-infrared universe obtained with the Herschel satellite, reaching galaxies fainter by an order of magnitude than in previous studies. Using these high-quality measurements, the author first demonstrates that the vast majority of galaxy star formation did not take place in merger-driven starbursts over 90% of the history of the universe, which suggests that galaxy growth is instead dominated by a steady infall of matter. The author further demonstrates that massive galaxies suffer a gradual decline in their star formation activity, providing an alternative path for galaxies to stop star formation. One of the key unsolved questions in astrophysics is how galaxies acquired their mass in the course of cosmic time. In the standard theory, the merging of galaxies plays a major role in forming new stars. Then, old galaxies abruptly stop forming stars through an unknown process. Investigating this theory requires an unbiased measure of the star formation intensity of galaxies, which has been unavailable due to the dust obscuration of stellar light.

This book focuses on understanding the stellar populations of massive star clusters and aims to investigate the origin, evolution and properties of binary systems, their collision products, as well as the general characteristics (e.g. ages, metal content) of stellar population(s) in star clusters. It introduces the basic background knowledge of various stellar populations in star clusters as well as their formation, interaction and evolution and offers high impact observational results on our understanding of the formation and evolution mode of star clusters. Based on these discoveries, this book proposes a series of future projects that can shed light on these topics. The research introduced in this book reveals key features of star clusters formation and by extension how all stars formed in our universe.

One approach to learning about stellar populations is to study them at three different levels of resolution. First in our own galaxy; secondly from nearby galaxies where stars can still be resolved; and thirdly in remote galaxies in which the stellar population can only be studied in integrated light. This International Astronomical Union Symposium covered the range of galaxies in its study of their stellar populations. Interspersed with theoretical papers, the observational papers provide a presentation of the progress that has been made in the field.

Cosmical Aerodynamics - Why was it so Difficult?.- Shaping Planetary Nebulae.- Investigating the Kinematics of the Faint Giant Haloes of Planetary Nebulae.- Shock Modelling of Planetary Nebulae.- Imaging Polarimetry of Proto-Planetary Nebulae.- IRAS 17423-1755: a BQ[ ] Star with a Variable Velocity Outflow.- Spectroscopic Constraints on Outflows from BN-type Objects.- First Wavelet Analysis of Emission Line Variations in Wolf-Rayet Stars-Turbulence in Hot-Star Outflows.- Complex Structure Associated with the Wolf-Rayet Star WR147.- The Importance of Continuum Radiation for the Stellar Wind Hydrodynamics of Hot Stars.- Herbig Ae/Be Stars.- 3-D Radiative Line Transfer for Be Star Envelopes.- Radiatively Driven Winds Using Lagrangian Hydrodynamics.- Parametric Determination of the Inclination of Keplerian Circumstellar Discs from Spectropolarimetric Profiles of Scattered Lines.- Observational Evidence for Global Oscillations in Be Star Disks.- Coupled Stellar Jet/Molecular Outflow Models.- Modelling Jet-Driven Molecular Outflows.- Jets.- A Simulation of a Jet with the Hiccups.- Interactions Between Molecular Outflows and Optical Jets.- Proper Motion Measurements in the HH 46/47 Outflow.- The Serpens Radio Jet: Evidence of Precession or Nutation.- Fragmentation and Heating of Streamers in Orion.- Highly Supersonic Molecular Flows in Wind-Clump Boundary Layers.- High Density Tracers in Outflow Regions: NH3 vs. CS.- Modelling the Constancy of X.- Gas-Grain Interaction in the Low Mass Star-Forming Region B335.- The Structure and Dynamics of M17SW.- The Hydrodynamics of Bipolar Explosions.- Shock-Heated Gas in the Outbursts of Classical Novae.- The Crab Nebula Revisited.- Pulsar Magnetospheres: Classical and Quasi-Classical Descriptions.- The Global Structure of the Insterstellar Medium.- A Power Spectrum Description of Galactic Neutral Hydrogen.- A Statistical Description of Astrophysical Turbulence.- Rosat Wide Field Camera Data and the Temperature of the Interstellar Medium.- Hierarchial Galactic Dynamo and Seed Magnetic Field Problem.- Cosmic Ray Diffusion at Energies of 1 MeV to 105 GeV.- Alfvenic Waves and Alignment of Large Grains.- An Interstellar Thermostat: Gas Temperature Regulated by Grain Charge.- Recent Optical Observations of Circumstellar and Interstellar Phenomena.- Internal Motions of HII Regions and Giant HII Regions.- High-Speed Flows in the Vicinity of the Trapezium Stars.- The Orion Nebula: Structure, Dynamics, and Population.- An Evolutionary Model for the Wolf Rayet Nebula NGC 2539.- Supersonic Turbulence in Giant Extragalactic HII Regions.- The Dynamics of the Ring Nebula Surrounding the LBV Candidate He 3-519.- Turbulent Mixing in Wind-Blown HII Regions.- Shock Wave Structure in the Cygnus Loop.- Catastrophic Cooling Diagnostics.- Star Formation in Shocked Layers.- Binary and Multiple Star Formation.- Galactic Fountains.- The Solution Topology of Galactic Winds.- Galactic Scale Gas Flows in Colliding Galaxies: 3-Dimensional, N-Body/Hydrodynamics Experiments.- Gas Flow in a Two Component Galactic Disk.- How Faithful Are N-Body Simulations of Disc Galaxies? - Artificial Suppression of Gaseous Dynamical Instabilities.- Long-Lived Spiral Structure in N-Body Simulations: Work in Progress.- The Use of Gravitational Microlensing to Scan the Structure of BAL QSOs.- Anomalous Component Motion in the MAS Double Radio Source 0646+600.- Effects of Dense Medium Surrounding Galactic-Sized Radio Sources.- 8.4 Ghz Vla Observations of the CfA Seyfert Sample.- Relativistic Jet Simulations.- Active Galactic Nuclei Flow Velocities and the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays.- Hidden Broad Line Regions and Anisotropy in AGN.- The Starburst Galaxy NGC1808: Another M82?.- List of Forthcoming Papers.- The 'KLUWER' LaTeX Style File.

This volume collects the contributions to the 10th European Workshop on White Dwarfs held in Blanes, Spain, in June 1996. The Workshop gathered together a number of specialists working in this area of research and provided an updated description of the current work of the field as well as its connections with other topics. This text provides a snapshot of current understanding of the origin, structure and evolution of white dwarf stars from both the theoretical and the observational points of view. It also takes into account the properties of white dwarfs as members of binary systems, stellar clusters and galactic populations.

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.

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.

Interstellar carbon monoxide (CO) was first detected in 1970 by R. W. Wilson, K. B. Jefferts, and A. A. Penzias through observations of its lowest rotational transition at 2.6 mm wavelength. This discovery opened the door to a profound new understanding of several diverse yet related fields, including the phases of the interstellar medium, the initial and final phases of stellar evolution, the chemistry of dense and diffuse interstellar matter and of the solar system, the structure of the Milky Way galaxy, and the content and structure of other galaxies. These are among the most fundamental research areas in astrophysics, and spectroscopic information about CO and other molecules serves as a primary tool of investigation. Continuing developments in instrumentation will further increase the power and utility of millimeter and submillimeter-wavelength molecular line spectroscopy. The 25th anniversary of the detection of CO was an opportunity for researchers from all branches of millimeter-wave astronomy to gather and review progress and future directions. These Proceedings discuss the state of the field and consider important unanswered questions.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

It has been known for a long time that stars are similar to our Sun. But it was only in 1810 that they were shown to be made of an incandescent gas. The chemical composition of this gas began to be determined in 1860. In 1940, it was demonstrated that the energy radiated by the stars is of thermonuclear origin. How stars form from interstellar matter and how they evolve and die was understood only recently, with our knowledge still incomplete. It was also realized recently that close double stars present a wide variety of extraordinary phenomena, which are far from being completely explored.This book explains all these aspects, and also discusses how the evolution of stars determine that of galaxies. The most interesting observations are illustrated by spectacular images, while the theory is explained as simply as possible, without however avoiding some mathematical or physical developments when they are necessary for a good understanding of what happens in stars. Without being a textbook for specialists, this book can be profitably read by students or amateurs possessing some basic scientific knowledge, who would like to be initiated in-depth to the fascinating world of stars.The author, an emeritus astronomer of the Paris Observatory, worked in various domains of astronomy connected with the subject of this book: interstellar matter and evolution of stars and galaxies. He directed the Marseilles observatory from 1983 to 1988 and served for fifteen years as Chief Editor of the professional European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. He has written many articles and books about physics and astronomy at different levels.

This thesis brings together the various techniques of X-ray spectral analysis in order to examine the properties of black holes that vary in mass by several orders of magnitude. In all these systems it is widely accepted that the X-ray emission is produced by Compton up-scattering of lower energy seed photons in a hot corona or accretion flow, and here these processes are examined through a study of the X-ray spectral variability of each source. A new technique is introduced, in which models are fitted to over 2 million X-ray spectra on time-scales as short as 16 ms, and subsequently it is shown that the nature of the correlation between intensity and spectral index is strongly dependent upon the spectral state of the black hole. Finally, the results of an extensive survey of nearby galactic nuclei using the Chandra X-ray telescope are presented in the form of images and spectra, and these results are used along with data from the literature to search for Compton-thick nuclei.

This book consists of invited reviews on Galactic Bulges written by experts in the field. A central point of the book is that, while in the standard picture of galaxy formation a significant amount of the baryonic mass is expected to reside in classical bulges, the question what is the fraction of galaxies with no classical bulges in the local Universe has remained open. The most spectacular example of a galaxy with no significant classical bulge is the Milky Way. The reviews of this book attempt to clarify the role of the various types of bulges during the mass build-up of galaxies, based on morphology, kinematics and stellar populations and connecting their properties at low and high redshifts. The observed properties are compared with the predictions of the theoretical models, accounting for the many physical processes leading to the central mass concentration and their destruction in galaxies. This book serves as an entry point for PhD students and non-specialists and as a reference work for researchers in the field.