Customer Reviews

The New Cosmos: An Introduction to Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

 

 

This book may not be the most flashy in illustrations and will require that you actually read whole sections instead of just browsing the highlights in sidebars. But it does contain a lot of solid information going into more detail on several topics than other introductory textbooks. It is targeted rather at the graduating physics student than at an interested lay person.

As a physics undergrad, an earlier edition of this book was one of our texts in 1982. The latest edition continues the tradition of providing a lucid description of the basic physical principles underlying astronomic phenomena.

Hence, you are shown how the temperature in a star can rise, because as its atoms fall towards each other under mutual gravity, the conservation of energy leads to an increase in kinetic energy and hence temperature. Enough to eventually trigger ignition of nuclear reactions. Well, provided the initial mass is large enough. Otherwise one gets brown dwarfs or gas giants like Jupiter.

Other subjects like spectroscopy are also derived from basic principles. It's nice to see how we can get the surface temperature of a star by looking at its spectrum and seeing which lines exist. And the strength of the magnetic field on its surface by the amount of splitting in certain lines. And even the rate of rotation by the minute Doppler shifts.

The evolution of the elements, from nuclear fusion, is well done. The text refers to the classic papers, including B2FH (Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle). Other key contributors like Chandrasekhar get their fair mention.

This book meets my expectations in that it covers a wide variety of topics, in some detail. I wanted to take a "step up" regarding technical detail, and this book is what I was looking for. The only drawback is the occasional heavy mathematics, but this is something I can grow into, and is not essential to enjoying the book.

It's not the flashiest text, I agree. But I think it can be used for a first course on astronomy and astrophysics (for students with some basic calculus and physics).

It covers everything: Celestial mechanics, the Sun and its planetary system, electromagnetic radiation, telescopes and detectors, astrophysics of individual stars, star clusters, interstellar matter, the Milky Way, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, cosmology, and cosmogony. But the style is concise, and there isn't enough space to cover it all in detail. It requires careful reading, and if used for a class, some topics probably need to be skipped or amplified by an instructor.

What would I add to it? Not much. Maybe a little more on planetary dynamics and magnetospheres, since I happen to find them interesting. Perhaps more material on relativity.

Being a German-American, I thought this book would get to the rudiments of astrophysics - and it does. Unfortunately, I seem to fall asleep before reading a page or two. The book is full of information ... in TEXT form. The illustrations offered are dry and somewhat difficult to extract information from. The methods of problem solving assume that you have a good handle on the topics discussed already (not for introductory Astrophysicists). If you are in need of a book to give straight to the point explanations, and fundamental equations - you've found it! Try reading at a coffee shop, though - and no decaf!