Customer Reviews

Spiral Structure in Galaxies: A Density Wave Theory

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The subject of the book is extremelly interesting and the author seems to know what he is talking about. However, I cannot recommend this book. The author presents it as a divulgative book for begginners. However, beginners will hardly take any advange of it because of the deep matters involved and the unnecessarily technical language he used. He made the mistake to write a divulgative book using the same language he would do in a scientific paper. I am afraid average readers will find it hard to read and will probably not survive the introductory chapters.

It is a tribute to the power of physics and the mind, that humans could conceive of models that try to explain the grand sweep of spiral galaxies. Bertin gives a summary of 30 years research in this field, where he is one of the principal investigators.

He describes how he and Lin and others attempted to integrate continually improving observations with refinements in theory. The result of which has been termed density wave theory. It borrows some ideas from hydrodynamics, and pushes these to a cosmic scale.

The theory is shown to describe fairly adequately how structure can arise out of billions of stars in a galaxy, spread over distances of a hundred thousand light years or more. Some readers will appreciate the elegance of the theory.