Astronomy

About our authors Eric Chaisson holds a Doctorate in Astrophysics from Harvard University, where he spent 10 years on the faculty of Arts and Sciences. For more than two decades thereafter, he served on the senior science staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute and held various professorships at Johns Hopkins and Tufts universities. He is now back at Harvard, where he teaches and conducts research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Eric has written 12 books on astronomy and has published nearly 200 scientific papers in professional journals. Steve McMillan holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Doctorate in Astronomy from Harvard University. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, where he continued his research in theoretical astrophysics, star clusters, and high-performance computing. Steve is currently Distinguished Professor of Physics at Drexel University and a frequent visiting researcher at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and Leiden University. He has published more than 100 articles and scientific papers in professional journals. Emily L. Rice, College of Staten Island, City University of New York holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy and German from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree and doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from UCLA. After completing her Ph.D. she held a postdoctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History, where she is still a resident research associate. Emily is currently Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island and doctoral faculty in physics at the Graduate Center, both part of the City University of New York. In addition to her research on low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets as co-PI of the Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) group, she is the co-author of Astronomy Labs: A Concept Oriented Approach and co-founder of the astronomy fashion blog STARtorialist.

Brief Contents

FOUNDATIONS

Charting the Heavens: The Foundations of Astronomy
The Copernican Revolution: The Birth of Modern Science
Light and Matter: The Inner Workings of the Cosmos
Telescopes: The Tools of Astronomy


OUR PLANETARY SYSTEM

The Solar System: Interplanetary Matter and the Birth of the Planets
Earth and Its Moon: Our Cosmic Backyard
The Terrestrial Planets: A Study in Contrasts
The Jovian Planets: Giants of the Solar System
Moons, Rings, and Plutoids: Small Worlds Among Giants


THE STARS

The Sun: Our Parent Star
Measuring the Stars: Giants, Dwarfs, and the Main Sequence
The Interstellar Medium: Star Formation in the Milky Way
Stellar Evolution: The Lives and Deaths of Stars
Neutron Stars and Black Holes: Strange States of Matter


GALAXIES AND THE UNIVERSE

The Milky Way Galaxy: A Spiral in Space
Normal and Active Galaxies: Building Blocks of the Universe
Hubble’s Law and Dark Matter: The Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos
Cosmology: The Big Bang and the Fate of the Universe
Life in the Universe: Are We Alone?