Hermann-Josef Röser - Böcker

Die Astronomie untersucht die Eigenschaften der Objekte und Phänomene im Weltraum. Sie zielt ab auf ein Verständnis des Universums als Ganzes, seiner Entstehung, seinem Aufbau und seiner Zukunft.Die neue Auflage des bekannten und populären Standardwerks Abriss der Astronomie ist umfassend aktualisiert und erweitert mit neuesten Themen und Erkenntnissen der Astrophysik wie u.a. extrasolare Planeten, Kosmologie, dunkle Materie. Verfaßt von ausgewählten Vertretern der Teilgebiete, ist es nicht nur für Astronomiestudenten, sondern auch für ambitionierte Amateurastronomen hervorragend geeignet.

This collection of papers presents a rather complete review of current knowledge of hot spots in some strong extragalactic radio sources. An overview of known results along with new data on radio observations and optical observations is given in the first and second parts of the book. Recent computational techniques which allow modelling and simulations of hot spots and jet behaviour are presented in the third part. The fourth part discusses particle acceleration and shock front phenomena. The articles will help the reader to appreciate the role hot spots play as laboratories for studying the interaction of jets with the surrounding medium and for testing our understanding of the overall source dynamics. The book is a valuable complement to the existing literature and an excellent introduction to this fairly new field of research.

The existence of jets emanating from the central sources ofradio galaxies and quasars was perhaps the most importantdiscovery for our understanding of the nature of activegalactic nuclei. These proceedings present reviews andresearch papers on extragalactic radio sources. The bookbegins witha discussion of the phenomenology and models ofradio sources. The main partis devoted to detailed studiesof jets by VLBI, to the information obtained about thestructure of the central source as deduced from variabilitystudies, to production, confinement and velocity of jets aswell as to numerical simulations of the jet phenomenon.Reviews of the two best studied jets - those in the radiogalaxy M87 and the quasar 3C273 - illustrate our currentobservational picture of extragalactic radio jets in allaccessible wavelength ranges. A section on the influence ofthe environment on radio galaxies concludes the book. Thistopical volume addresses researchers and graduate studentsin astrophysics.

Understanding the formation and evolution of early galaxies is one of the most challenging problems in modern astronomy. In this volume leading specialists describe observations of high and intermediate redshift galaxies as well as the deep survey activities. Further topics include cosmology, and modelling and computer simulations of galaxy formation. Thus the reader will find here a fairly complete picture of the state of the art in this active field of astrophysics research.