Astronomy and Astrophysics Library Series

Recommended Reading Order

1. Astrophysics

   • Wolfgang Kundt

   • 183 pages
   • 7 hours of reading

   Devised for a quantitative understanding of the physics of the universe from the solar system through the milky way to clusters of galaxies all the way to cosmology, this acclaimed text offers among the most concise and most critical ones of extant works. Special chapters are devoted to magnetic and radiation processes, disks, black-hole candidacy, bipolar flows, cosmic rays, gamma-ray bursts, image distortions, and special sources. At the same time, planet earth is viewed as the arena for life, with plants and animals having evolved to homo sapiens during cosmic time. This text is unique in covering the basic qualitative and quantitative tools, formulae as well as numbers, needed to for the precise interpretation of frontline phenomena.

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2. Asymptotic giant branch stars

   • Harm J. Habing

   • 559 pages
   • 20 hours of reading

   This book deals with stars during a short episode before they undergo a ma jor, and fatal, transition. Soon the star will stop releasing nudear energy, it will become a planetary nebula for abrief but poetic moment, and then it will turn into a white dwarf and slowly fade out of sight. Just before this dramatic change begins the star has reached the highest luminosity and the largest diameter in its existence, and while it is a star detectable in galaxies beyond the Local Group, its structure contains already the inconspicuous white dwarf it will become. It is called an "asymptotic giant branch star" or "AGB star". Over the last 30 odd years AGB stars have become a topic of their own although individual members of this dass had already been studied for cen turies without realizing what they were. In the early evolution, so called "E-AGB"-phase, the stars are a bit bluer than, but otherwise very similar to, what are now called red giant branch stars (RGB stars). It is only in the sec ond half of their anyhow brief existence that AGB stars differ fundamentally from RGB stars.

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3. The Early Universe

   • Gerhard Börner

   • 466 pages
   • 17 hours of reading

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   In this corrected and enlarged edition of Börner's well respected textbook, you will find an up-to-date account of the interplay between particle physics and astrophysics upon which modern cosmology is founded. The author describes some of the theories which have been developed to model the fundamental interaction of elementary particles in the extremely high temperatures of the early universe, taking care to distinguish facts and well- established results from hypotheses and speculations. The three parts of the book discuss the standard hot big bang model of the early universe, the basic ideas of the standard and the grand unified theories of elementary particles, and the influence of dark matter of the large- scale evolution of structure. In addition to making some minor corrections, the author has added an appendix presenting new results and an updated bibliography. Two main groups of readers are research students in astronomy can use this book to understand the impact of elementary particle theory on cosmology, while research students in particle physics can use it to acquaint themselves with the basic facts of cosmology. The book is written carefully enough to appeal also to a wider audience of physicists.

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