Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Space Science - Cosmology

An international conference entitled "Zdenek Kopal's Binary Star Legacy" was held on the occasion of the late Professor Kopal's 90th birthday in his home town of Litomysl/Czech Republic and dedicated to the memory of one of the leading astronomers of the 20th century.

Professor Kopal, who devoted 60 years of his scientific life to the exploration of close binary systems, initiated a breakthrough in this field with his description of binary components as non-spherical stars deformed by gravity, with surfaces following Roche equipotentials. Such knowledge triggered the development of...

Neutron stars hold a central place in astrophysics, not only because they are made up of the most extreme states of the condensed matter, but also because they are, along with white dwarfs and black holes, one of the stable configurations that stars reach at the end of stellar evolution. Neutron stars posses the highest rotation rates and strongest magnetic fields among all stars. They radiate prolifically, in high energy electromagnetic radiation and in the radio band.

This book is devoted to the selected lectures presented in the 6^th NATO-ASI series entitled "The...

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot traces successive interpretations of Heraclitus' words. Over time, Hadot finds, "Nature loves to hide" has meant...

Beginning with some basic facts about the observable universe the authors consider in successive chapters the complete range of topics that make up a degree course in cosmology and particle astrophysics. The outstanding feature of this book is that it is self-contained, in that no specialised knowledge is required on the part of the reader, apart from basic undergraduate mathematics and physics.

This paperback edition will again target students of physics, astrophysics and cosmology at the advanced undergraduate level or early graduate level. One of the book's biggest strong points...