Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Modern Stellar Astrophysics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent introduction to Stellar Astrophysics, covering from the very start the essential concepts needed to undertake the subject, and gradually building up untill a nice introductory level is achieved. The book is well organized: divided into two blocks, starts by setting a solid basis upon which later presents the subject. In the first and introductory part, the essential astronomical concepts are explained, and in the second part the author gets into the actual Astrophysics of Stars. The book is pleasant on several levels; conceptually, coherently and aesthetically, all this while making use of a clear, straightforward matheticall formalism which is simple enough to follow. It is well suited for an introductory course at the undergraduate level, and one of the few books which actually bridges the gap between the high-level available pieces and the general public oriented literature on the subject.

Modern Stellar Astrophysics was a nice book. It was organized very well and presented the material in an orderly fashion. I thought that it lacked depth though. It gave many concepts, but they lacked mathematical examples to go with those concepts. A good book for people who already understand modern physics, but for those without a deep understanding of modern physics it will leave many open questions. Lastly, the homework questions at the end of the chapters resembled those examples throughout the chapters themselves very closely and even identically, thus answering them takes absolutely no analytical skills just mere copying.

Update: given that I really enjoyed this book I am updating this review. This book is really excellent for people with advanced knowledge of modern physics. However, it is not a good book for people without at least an introductory course in modern physics and possibly a course in quantum mechanics. This book does not rigorously attempt to teach physics, rather it assumes prior knowledge. Given that said, this book is very enjoyable book to read for those with the background knowledge; it takes a history of astrophysics approach. Really great book and I am scoring this book a perfect 5.

I have taught 2-3 classes in astrophysics at the undergraduate level and found this a useful textbook. The book is essentially the stellar parts of the larger one volume text by the authors and it is a lot easier to carry around than the "big orange book." The layout of the material is logical and gets the student through the material using basic calculus arguments so it is good for students who have finished their core calculus sequence and have had some exposure to differential equations and are just starting in their upper level courses. The text strikes a good balance between mathematical and descriptive arguments.

I think the discussion is thin sometimes as the authors go from one topic to the next with a single sample calculation in between. Having looked at other texts though this is still one of the best at getting the student from Keplerian orbits to stellar interiors in a semester. I prefer it to Zeilik's book. The problems are not so cookbook as the one reviewer makes out and they help the student confirm their understanding of the material. The longer problems make nice short projects. I think they are well chosen and work out nicely _most_ of the time. I like the model Cepheid numerical exercise. One caveat below on the numerics in the text.

The authors have included a simple stellar structure fortran code they use for HW problems. Using the formulas derived in the text is surely a good thing. It shows the student how it all fits together... Right? However the code uses a simple shooting method integrating inward from the surface to "find" the solution that satisfies both the surface _and_ the core boundary conditions for a fixed input mass. This is ridiculously numerically unstable and requires the student to find that the correct solution is, say, between 0.9991 and 0.9992 by trial and error. It would have been trivial to modify the program to try to find a root instead of having the student type in a single mass for a run, have the solution diverge as it goes deeper into the star, and get a useless "wow, that didn't work-- please try again" error message. The second edition of the book does not fix this, but does add a pretty graphical interface... The students working with this program to solve the suggested end of chapter problems quickly learn there is no way to guess the answer and then stop trying. Why not fix the underlying code?

Despite the numerical caveat I like the book a lot and will use it again when I teach the course again (supplementing the stellar code with a lecture on numerical methods to the students so they can fix it themselves - once you modify the code it actually _is_ useful and I have used it in class).

This book is essential to anyone who wants to learn properly stellar astrophysiscs as a sort of "dictionary" related to this subject.