Vinod Krishan - Böcker

Much of the excitement in modern Solar Physics has come from the realisation that the Sun is a plasma and that this plasma is interacting with the magnetic field in a wide variety of subtle ways. As well as being of great interest in their own right the observed plasma phenomena on the Sun are of much wider importance, since they reveal to us details of basic phenomena that are expected to be occurring throughout the universe. It was with this in mind that 173 solar physicists from 17 countries gathered together in Bangalore with an air of anticipation. We were not disappointed as we received the warmest of welcomes from our graceful and charming host,Vinod Krishan. She and her colleagues worked tirelessly to make our stay a most memorable one and to ensure that the meeting ran with calm and efficiency. In addition to being stimulated by an excellent series of talks on the up-to-the­ minute advances in our subject, it was a pleasure to make new friendships from so many countries and to learn, in particular, of the Solar Physics being done in India which has a great tradition and is of a high standard. Furthermore, we enjoyed hearing about Indian culture and appreciating its beauty, especially on our day's tour into the countryside to visit some Hindu and Jain temples.

Much of the excitement in modern Solar Physics has come from the realisation that the Sun is a plasma and that this plasma is interacting with the magnetic field in a wide variety of subtle ways. As well as being of great interest in their own right the observed plasma phenomena on the Sun are of much wider importance, since they reveal to us details of basic phenomena that are expected to be occurring throughout the universe. It was with this in mind that 173 solar physicists from 17 countries gathered together in Bangalore with an air of anticipation. We were not disappointed as we received the warmest of welcomes from our graceful and charming host,Vinod Krishan. She and her colleagues worked tirelessly to make our stay a most memorable one and to ensure that the meeting ran with calm and efficiency. In addition to being stimulated by an excellent series of talks on the up-to-the­ minute advances in our subject, it was a pleasure to make new friendships from so many countries and to learn, in particular, of the Solar Physics being done in India which has a great tradition and is of a high standard. Furthermore, we enjoyed hearing about Indian culture and appreciating its beauty, especially on our day's tour into the countryside to visit some Hindu and Jain temples.

This work provides an introduction to astrophysical plasmas and fluids for graduate students of astronomy preparing either for a research career in the field or just aspiring to achieve a decent degree of familiarity with 99 per cent of the cosmos. The contents provide a representation of the phenomenal diversity of dominant roles that plasmas and fluids play in the near and far reaches of the universe. The breadth of coverage of basic physical processes is a feature of this textbook. By first using the Liouville equation to derive the single-fluid, two-fluid and kinetic descriptions of a plasma and a fluid, and then demonstrating the use of these descriptions for specific situations in the rest of the book, the author has chosen a different way of handling this large technical subject. The two major astrophysical issues, fluid or plasma configurations and their radiative signatures, figure prominently throughout the book. The problems are designed to give the reader a feel for the quantitative properties of celestial objects.

Most astronomers believe that the universe began about 15 billion years ago when an explosion led to its expansion and cooling. The present state of the universe compels us to believe that the universe was extremely hot and dense in its infancy. In the beginning there was intense radiation. The photons produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter and a plasma soup of particles and antiparticles was present. Plasma is the first state of matter from which all the other states originated. This book discusses the diversity of cosmic and terrestrial plasmas found in the early universe, galactic and intergalactic media, stellar atmospheres, interstellar spaces, the solar system and the Earth's ionosphere, and their observability with the most recent telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray telescope and gamma ray telescopes. It deals with different ways of creating plasmas such as thermal, pressure and radiative ionization for laboratory and cosmic plasmas.