For millennia mankind has watched as the heavens move in their stately progression from night to night and from year to year, presaging with their changes the changing seasons. The sun, the moon, and the planets move in what appears to be an unchanging firmament, except occasionally when a new "star" appears. Among the new stars there are comets, novae, and finally supernovae, the subject of this book. Superstitious mankind regarded these events as significant portents and recorded them carefully so that we have records of supernovae that may reach back as far as 1300 B. C. (Clark and...

As this excellent book demonstrates, the study of comets has now reached the fas cinating stage where we understand comets in general simple tenns while, at the same time, we are uncertain about practically all the details of cometary nature, structure, processes, and origin. In every aspect, even including dynamics, a choice among several or many competing theories is made impossible simply by the lack of detailed knowledge. The space missions, snapshot studies of two comets, partic ularly the one that immortalizes the name of Sir Edmund Halley, have produced a huge mass of valuable new...

The existence of neutron stars was not only a brilliant theoretical prediction, but also one of the most unexpected and astonishing discoveries of all heavenly bodies. Twenty-five years after the remarkable event of their discovery, neutron stars, which are the densest, the most strongly magnetized, and the most rapid ly rotating bodies in the Galaxy, remain objects of intense interest. This book is a revised and enlarged version of the original Russian edition. The last five years were marked by the discovery of a supernova in the closest galaxy and dozens of X-ray sources and millisecond...

In this book we summarize the essential results of our efforts over the years to calculate energies, wave functions, and electromagnetic transitions of atoms as functions of the magnetic field strength from laboratory fields up to neutron star magnetic fields. Motivated by the observational evidence of huge magnetic 5 fields with strengths up to 10 T in the vicinity of white dwarf stars and of up 9 to 10 T in the vicinity of neutron stars the authors, together with coworkers and candidates for doctor and diploma degrees, have investigated this, fasci nating quantum mechanical problem more or...

This authoritative text on plasma behavior in diverse astrophysical contexts combines classical and contemporary theory to show how fundamental principles in electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, and quantum mechanics find expression in plasma physics.

White dwarfs, neutron stars, and (solar mass) black holes are the collapsed cores of stars which, near the ends of their luminous lives, have shed most of their mass in supernova explosions or other, less spectacular, instabilities. Here gravity crushes matter to realms that lie far beyond present empirical knowledge. This book explores the diverse forms that such compact stars can possibly take, as constrained by the laws of nature: the general principles of relativity and quantum mechanics, the properties of nuclear matter deduced from nuclei, and the asymptotic freedom of quarks at high...

This book deals with the fundamentals of stellar interferometry with emphasis on aperture synthesis using sparse array of telescopes particularly at optical/IR wavelengths, the origin, properties, and optical effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, techniques developed to overcome image degradation. Studded with more than one hundred and fifty illustrations and tens of footnotes, it addresses the basic tricks of trade, current trend, motivation, methods, and path to future promise of true interferometry both from the ground and space. Also discussed are the technical challenge...

Celestial fundamental catalogues are a prerequisite for the determination of absolute positions and motions in space. Presently, positional astrometry is at the watershed between classical fundamental catalogues, based on moving reference stars, and modern catalogues, based on extragalactic reference objects with non-measurable motion. This book addresses the concepts and methods of the respective construction techniques leading to the stellar frame of the FK5 (fifth fundamental catalogue) and to the newly adopted extragalactic radio reference frame, ICRF (international celestial reference...