Customer Reviews

Galaxies in the Universe: An Introduction

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Galaxies in the Universe is an absolutely wonderful book. That being said, it is the type of textbook written so that the problems are an integral part of the text. That's not my personal preference because my schedule is such that I don't always have time to work them. The other problem with that style is that if you get stuck on any one problem, you run the risk of getting very little out of the rest of the book. Even so, most of the problems are very fun and not so difficult that someone who is strong in math and physics won't be able to get through them.

It is very definitely an introductory text intended to get one started on the basics before going to a different book to tackle harder material. By the end of the book you'll have done things like calculate the amount of dark matter that must exist within a given galaxy. My favorite part of this book is the section on gravitational lensing and dark matter. A long time ago I tried to decipher the original Kaiser and Squires article on the topic, and never really succeeded. This book explained the material with wonderful clarity.

The mathematical content of the book is relatively simple. Anyone familiar with multivariable calculus should be able to work through it without too much trouble. Some of the key results and ideas will be familiar to physics majors who've already taken a classical mechanics course or a thermostatistics course, but applied in a sufficiently different context that they don't seem redundant. This would be a good book for someone who has strong basics in general physics, is strong in undergraduate calculus, and has an interest in galactic astrophysics.

This book does an excellent job of delineating the many observations of galaxies, not only in the present but also in the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies since the big bang. Much of the contemporary theories about galactic structure and star movements is backed up with math. Since this is a textbook, there are many problems to work on, and there are solution hints in an appendix. I would recommend it to any serious student of astronomy and physics.

This is one of the clearest and best written undergraduate-level textbooks on galaxies, requiring a fair amount of mathematics and physics to fully appreciate the harder sections. However, things are very well explained in the clear prose, even if you don't want to grapple with the (not over-numerous) equations. Sparke and Gallagher are "good practical extragalactic astronomers" who distil for the reader much of the everyday knowledge used by the observational extragalactic astronomer, with a stronger focus on easier-to-appreciate observational results than on their complex and difficult derivations. This textbook sensibly begins with several chapters on the Milky Way galaxy, as our own Galaxy represents "baseline truth" in humankind's quest to understand the galaxies.
This book is easy to read and very well structured. But it is at the university level; so the reader must have some prior algebra, and the ideal reader of this book should also be comfortable with graphs and physical argument.

This book is a little dense and its homework problems are especially confusing because of the poor framework laid out to solve them.