This volume contains the proceedings of the meeting entitled, "The IGM/Galaxy Connection: The Distribution of Baryons at z = 0. " The meeting was held August 8 -10 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, Colorado on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (see conference photo). We organized this meeting because we felt it was time to address the link between galaxies and the intergalactic medium at low redshift. In this vein, we posed several questions to the conference participants: Where are the baryons in the local universe and in what phase do they reside? What signatures of galaxy evolution have been imprinted on the IGM? What percentage of intergalactic gas is left from the galaxy formation process? What does the distribution of baryons at z = 0 tell us about the early universe? The conference was an overwhelming success with lots of friendly interaction and discussion among the participants. At lunch we were treated to splendid views from the NCAR terrace and discussions rang ing from the importance of the LSR, GSR, and LGSR velocity frames to how long the desserts would last with 90 astronomers and the hot Boul der sun. From an inventory of the baryons, to the associations between galaxies and Lya absorbers, to the mechanisms by which galaxies obtain and lose gas, the conference covered many topics. The results of these endeavors are contained in these pages and eloquently summarized by Chris Impey."

Understanding star formation is one of the key fields in present-day astrophysics. This book treats a wide variety of the physical processes involved, as well as the main observational discoveries, with key points being discussed in detail. The current star formation in our galaxy is emphasized, because the most detailed observations are available for this case. The book presents a comparison of the various scenarios for star formation, discusses the basic physics underlying each one, and follows in detail the history of a star from its initial state in the interstellar gas to its becoming a condensed object in equilibrium. Both theoretical and observational evidence to support the validity of the general evolutionary path are presented, and methods for comparing the two are emphasized. The author is a recognized expert in calculations of the evolution of protostars, the structure and evolution of disks, and stellar evolution in general. This book will be of value to graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics as well as to active researchers in the field.

The Pacific Rim Conferences for the first decade from the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's were primary concerned with binary stars research. The Conference expanded to all areas of Stellar Astrophysics for the last two meetings in Hong Kong; at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1997 and at the Hong Kong University in 1999. At the conclusion of the very successful Pacific Rim Conference on Stellar Astrophysics held in Hong Kong University, members of the Sci entific Organizing Committee began planning for the next conference. We approached Professor Tan Lu of Nanjing University and Professor Tipei Li of the Institute of High Energy Physics about hosting a con ference in China. The city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province and a city in Yunnan province, were considered to be the most likely locations. It be came crucial to find the right person to serve as Chair (or Co-chairs) for the Local Organizing Committee. Initially, Professor Lu was the logical choice but he declined for personal reasons. Professor Li was invited to lead a new department of Astrophysics at Tsinghua University so he could not take on the additional load of chairing the LOC. Professor Gang Zhao of Beijing Astronomical Observatory was approached to take on the task but he also declined. This has been a busy time for Chinese astronomers. The SOC decided to have the conference dedicated to honor Dr. Helmut A."

Every year Earth is bombarded with about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material. This includes microscopic cosmic dust particles shed by comets and asteroids in outer space, meteorites, as well as large comets and asteroids that have led to catastrophic events in the geologic past. Originally considered only a curiosity, extraterrestrial matter found on Earth provides the only samples we have from comets, asteroids and other planets. Only recently mankind has started to actively collect extraterrestrial matter in space (Apollo program, Stardust mission) rather than to wait for its delivery to Earth. Still, most of our knowledge of the origin and evolution of our solar system is based on careful studies of meteorites, cosmic dust, and traces of large impact events in the geologic record such as the mass extinction that terminated the Cretaceous Period and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. This book summarizes our current knowledge of the properties, origin, orbital evolution and accretion mechanism of extraterrestrial matter accreted on Earth and sheds light on accretion processes and fluxes in the geologic past. The chapters in the first part of the book are arranged in order to follow extraterrestrial matter from its origin in space, its orbital evolution on its way to Earth, its interaction with the Earth magnetosphere and atmosphere to its more or less violent collision with the Earth's surface. In the second part of the book several chapters deal with the present?day flux of cosmic dust and meteorites to Earth. Finally, several chapters deal with the reconstruction of the accretion history of extraterrestrial matter on Earth, starting with the most recent geologic past and ending with the very early, violent accretion period shortly after the formation of Earth, Moon and other solid planets in our solar system.

For every galaxy in the field or in clusters, there are about three galaxies in groups. The Milky Way itself resides in a group. Groups in the local universe offer the chance to study galaxies in environments characterized by strong interactions. In the cosmological context, groups trace large-scale structures better than clusters; the evolution of groups and clusters appears to be related. All these aspects of research are summarized in this book.

In this PhD thesis, which was nominated for publication in this series by the Astronomical Institute at Charles University, Prague, the author investigates the orbital evolution of an initially thin stellar disc around a supermassive black hole, considering various perturbative sources of gravity. His findings, obtained by both direct numerical N-body modelling and using standard perturbation methods, offer a viable theoretical explanation for the observed configuration of young stars in the Galactic Centre. This marks a significant contribution to a topic of great interest in contemporary astrophysics. The author also shows in his thesis that a secular instability (m = 1 mode) may occur in the embedding spherical cluster of old stars. This increases the richness of possible evolution scenarios of the embedding cluster and may lead to effective feeding of supermassive black holes through tidal disruption of stars on extremely eccentric orbits.

The discovery of chemical elements in celestial bodies and the first estimates of the chemical composition of the solar atmosphere were early results of Astrophysics - the subdiscipline of Astronomy that was originally concerned with the general laws of radiation and with spectroscopy. Following the initial quantitative abundance studies by Henry Norris Russell and by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a tremendous amount of theoretical, observa tional, laboratory and computational work led to a steadily improving body of knowledge of photospheric abundances - a body of knowledge that served to guide the theory of stellar evolution. Solar abundances determined from photospheric spectra, together with the very similar abundances determined from carbonaceous chondrites (where extensive information on isotopic composition is available as well), are nowadays the reference for all cosmic composition measures. Early astrophysical studies of the solar photospheric composition made use of atmosphere models and atomic data. Consistent abundances derived from different atmospheric layers and from lines of different strength helped to confirm and estab lish both models and atomic data, and eventually led to the now accepted, so-called "absolute" abundance values - which, for practical reasons, however, are usually given relative to the number of hydrogen nuclei.

This book contains an up-to-date review of the structure and evolution of disk galaxies from both the observational and theoretical point of view. The book is the proceedings of the Island Universes conference held at the island of Terschelling, The Netherlands in July 2005, which attracted about 130 experts and students in the field. The conference was organized as a tribute to Dr. Piet C. van der Kruit for receiving the honorary Jacobus C. Kapteyn Professorship in Astronomy. The eight topical themes discussed at the meeting are reflected in these proceedings: 1) Properties of Stellar Disks, 2) Kinematics and Dynamics of Disk Galaxies, 3) Bars, Spiral Structure, and Secular Evolution in Disk Galaxies, 4) The Outskirts and Environment of Disk Galaxies, 5) Interstellar Matter, 6) (Evolution of) Star Formation in Galactic Disks, 7) Disk Galaxies through Cosmic Time, and 8) Formation Models of Disk Galaxies.

Galaxy groups and clusters provide excellent laboratories for studying galaxy properties in different environments and at different look-back times. In particular, the recent detections of high-redshift cluster candidates, only possible with the current high-technology instrumentation, add a new dimension to the problem. Along with the ever increasing computing power and sophisticated algorithms to model clusters of galaxies, it may help us to understand the origins of today's groups and clusters, as well as of their member galaxies. These workshop proceedings provide a snapshot of the current research in this subject, covering the observations, theory and numerical simulations relevant to galaxy evolution in groups and clusters. In this book, intended primarily to researchers in the field, particular emphasis is given to the recent impressive progress in the field, on important new results, and on the future prospects and open questions to be tackled.

Supernovae, their bearing on cosmology and their connection to gamma-ray bursts are now at the center of astrophysical research programs. This volume deals with astronomical observations of supernovae and their relation to nuclear and particle astrophysics. All known aspects of supernovae explosions are investigated in articles specifically written for researchers and advanced graduate students. It also includes recent numerical "experiments" related to the question of hydrodynamical instability in two and three dimensions and to problems concerning the complexity of radiation transport in the models. Other contributions discuss the possible energy sources needed to drive these powerful stellar explosions.

This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference on Shocks in Astrophysics held at UMIST, Manchester, England from January 9-12, 1995. The study of interstellar and circumstellar gas dynamics has a long and distinguished history in Manchester and has been almost entirely concentrated in the school founded by Franz Kahn in the Astronomy Department, University of Manchester. In January 1993, one of us (AR) was appointed to the faculty of the Astrophysics Group in the Department of Mathematics at UMIST and astrophysical gas dynam ics became a major interest of the Group. The subject of this conference was chosen partly for the topicality of the subject matter and partly to help synthesise this expertise with the expertise in interstellar chemistry already present in the Group. The first fruits of this synthesis are contained in this volume. As it happened, this conference celebrated, not so much the beginnings of a long and fruitful collabo ration, but rather gave many of Alex's friends the chance to say a fond farewell as he departed UMIST at the end of January 1995 to take up a chair at UNAM, Mexico City. The core of this volume consists of twelve review articles, marked (R) in the list of contents, incorporating observational and theoretical studies of shock waves in a variety of situations from Herbig-Haro objects to Supernova Remnants to Active Galactic Nuclei. We have also included the contributed (C) and poster (P) papers."

The underlying astrophysical mechanisms of the objects known as asymptotic giant branch stars - the structures that occur during the dramatic period prior to a star's death - is the main theme of this text. Over the past three decades, asymptotic giant branch stars have become a topic of their own, and the contributions to this volume all focus on these entities themselves, rather than their connections to other fields of astronomy. Among the many topics covered are new methods of high- quality infrared observation and the more detailed and realistic simulations made possible by increasingly fast computers. This collection should be useful to graduate students who work in the field, teachers who want to address the subject in their courses, and to astronomers from various backgrounds who are interested in the astrophysics of AGB stars.

This workshop is devoted to Double stars. The general topics of the meeting were: for mation, dynamics and evolutionary tracks. In accordance with the pure tradition of the Saint James way, "pilgrims" from all over the world come to meet together in Santiago. Although with a common interest (double stars), this meeting was a multidisciplinary one, since scientists with different backgrounds participated in it. As a matter of fact, we think that this is the first workshop jointly supported by IAU Commissions 7 (Celestial mechanics) and 26 (Double and multiple stars). It is our belief that this meeting will be the origin of a more close relations and common research. This meeting was held under the invitation of the University of Santiago de Compostela to commemorate its fifth centenary, and organized by the Astronomical Observatory named after its founder, Ramon M. Aller, who made significant contributions in the study of visual double stars, and was one of the pioneers who put the seeds of the present blossoming of Astronomy in Spain. The Scientific Organizing Committee was formed by Drs. C. Allen, P. Couteau, J. A. Docobo, R. Dvorak, A. Elipe, S. Ferraz-Mello (co-chairman), H.A.McAlister, M. Valtonen, C.Worley (chairman) and H. Zinnecker. The Local Organizing Committee was formed by Drs. J. A. Docobo (chairman), A."

Planetary nebulae present a fascinating range of shapes and morphologies. They are ideal laboratories for the study of different astrophysical processes: atomic physics, radiative transfer, stellar winds, shocks, wind-wind interaction, and the interaction between stellar winds and the interstellar medium. In addition, planetary nebulae provide information about the late stages of stellar evolution. In the last five years studies of planetary nebulae have progressed very rapidly and new phenomena and insights have been gained. This is partly due to new observations (e.g. from the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISO satellite and new infrared and millimeter spectrographs) and partly to the advancement of hydrodynamic simulations of the structures of planetary nebulae (PN). Many of these new results were reported at IAU Symposium 180 in Groningen, the Netherlands, on August 26 to 30, 1996. This symposium was dedicated to one of the pioneers of PN research: Stuart Pottasch. These proceedings contain chapters on: Introduction to PN with the basic parameters Distances of PN The central stars of PN The envelopes of PN The evolution from AGB to PN The evolution from PN to white dwarfs PN in the galactic context PN in extragalactic systems The future of PN research . The book contains 29 reviews and more than 200 shorter contributions.

TheFifthHEIDELBERGInternationalConferenceonDarkMatterinAst- and Particle Physics, DARK 2004, took place at Texas A&M University, College Station Texas, USA, October 3-9, 2004. It was, after Cape Town 2002, the second conference of this series held outside Germany. The earlier meetings, starting in 1996, were held in Heidelberg. Dark Matter is still one of the most exciting and central ?elds of ast- physics, particle physics and cosmology. The conference covered, as usual for this series, a large range of topics, theoretical and experimental. Theoretical talks covered SUSY/SUGRA phenomenology, which provides at present a preferred theoretical framework for the existence of cold dark matter. Also included were other possible explanations of dark matter such as SUSY Q balls, exciting New Symmetries, etc. The most important experiments in the underground search for cold and hot dark matter were presented. Talks describing the current experimental dark matter bounds, what might be obtained in the near future, and the reach of future large (i.e. one ton) detectors were given. The potential of future colliders to correlate accelerator physics with dark matter searches was also outlined. Thus the reader will be able to see the present status and future prospects in the search for dark matter. The exciting astronomical evidence for dark matter and corresponding observations concerning the Milky Way's black hole, high-redshift clusters, wakes in dark matter halos were other important topics at the conference.

The majority of this volume is devoted to the subject of high energy radiation from galactic and extragalactic black holes. The volume also covers future space missions to primitive bodies and fine structures in the middle atmosphere and their origin. In total, 27 papers are presented, the final two included in the appendix emanating from the previous COSPAR meeting in Washington.

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.

This book presents a study of the young supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946 in order to reveal the origin of cosmic rays in our galaxy. The study focuses on the X-ray and gamma radiation from the cosmic ray electrons and protons in the supernova remnant as well as the emission from the surrounding interstellar gas measured by the NANTEN2 4-m radio telescope at Nagoya University. The gamma rays show a good spatial correspondence with the interstellar gas, which for the first time provides strong evidence of the acceleration of cosmic ray protons. Additionally, the author determines that an interaction between the supernova shockwaves and interstellar gas, referred to as "shock-cloud interaction," promotes the efficient acceleration of cosmic ray electrons in the supernova remnant. The book reveals that the interstellar gas plays an essential role in producing the high-energy radiation and cosmic rays, offering vital new insights into the origin and behavior of galactic cosmic rays.

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."

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.

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.

This volume documents the contributions presented at the III Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA). Covering a wide range of topics, the 92 contributed papers give a comprehensive overview of the current state of Spanish astronomy. The Proceedings include special reviews dealing with the cosmological evolution of star-forming galaxies, the nature of cosmic gamma-ray bursts, infrared astrophysics with ISO, and the distance scale after Hipparcos, with special emphasis on the development of the next generation of instruments to propel astrophysical research into the new century. The contents of these Proceedings thus reflect the broad interests of the Spanish astronomical community. The significance of these proceedings can hardly be exaggerated, since here, for the first time, the SEA publishes the proceedings of its own scientific meeting. The intended audience is professional astronomers and graduate astronomy students worldwide.

Many of the ISO observers who assembled for this workshop at Ringberg c- tle met for the third time in the Bavarian Alps. At two previous meetings in 1989 and 1990 surveys were only a minor topic. At that time we were excited by the discoveries of the IRAS survey mission and wanted to follow it up with pointed observations using an observatory telescope equipped with versatile instruments. With the rapid development of detector arrays and stimulated by ISO's Observing Time Allocation Committee, however, surveys eventually became an issue for the upcoming mission. In a review paper on "Infrared S- veys - the Golden Age of Exploration" given at an IAU meeting in 1996, Chas Beichman already mentioned that there are ISO surveys. They were at the bottom of his hit list, while the winners were future space missions (Planck, SIRTF, etc. ) and ground-based surveys in preparation (Sloan, 2MASS, DE- NIS, etc. ). He organized his table according to the relative explorable volume, calculated from the solid angle covered on the sky and the maximum distance derived from the detection sensitivity. Clearly, with this ?gure of merit, ISO, as a pointed observatory, is rated low. Applying the classical de?nition of a survey, i. e. to search in as large a volume as possible for new or rare objects and/or study large numbers of objects of various classes in order to obtain statistical properties, ISO was indeed limited.

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.