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 AstronomyThe Copernican Revolution: The Birth of Modern ScienceLight and Matter: The Inner Workings of the CosmosTelescopes: The Tools of AstronomyOUR PLANETARY SYSTEM The Solar System: Interplanetary Matter and the Birth of the PlanetsEarth and Its Moon: Our Cosmic BackyardThe Terrestrial Planets: A Study in ContrastsThe Jovian Planets: Giants of the Solar SystemMoons, Rings, and Plutoids: Small Worlds Among GiantsTHE STARS The Sun: Our Parent StarMeasuring the Stars: Giants, Dwarfs, and the Main SequenceThe Interstellar Medium: Star Formation in the Milky WayStellar Evolution: The Lives and Deaths of StarsNeutron Stars and Black Holes: Strange States of MatterGALAXIES AND THE UNIVERSE The Milky Way Galaxy: A Spiral in SpaceNormal and Active Galaxies: Building Blocks of the UniverseHubble’s Law and Dark Matter: The Large-Scale Structure of the CosmosCosmology: The Big Bang and the Fate of the UniverseLife in the Universe: Are We Alone?