Carnegie Observatories Astrophysics 4 Volume Paperback Set – serie

This book was originally published in 2004. Black holes are among the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Weighing up to several billion Suns, massive black holes have long been suspected to be the central powerhouses of energetic phenomena such as quasars. Advances in astronomy have not only provided spectacular proof of this long-standing paradigm, but have revealed the unexpected result that far from being rare, exotic beasts, they inhabit the center of virtually all large galaxies. Candidate black holes have been identified in increasingly large numbers of galaxies, both inactive and active, to the point where statistical studies are possible. Fresh work has highlighted the close connection between the formation, growth, and evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. This volume contains the invited lectures from an international symposium that was held to explore this exciting theme, and is a valuable review for professional astronomers and graduate students.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest and most massive collapsed systems in the Universe, and as such they are valuable probes of cosmological structure and galaxy evolution. The advent of extensive galaxy surveys, large ground-based facilities, space-based missions such as HST, Chandra and XMM-Newton and detailed numerical simulations makes a particularly exciting time to be involved in this field. The review papers in this volume span a comprehensive range of research in this area, including theoretical expectations for the growth of structure, survey techniques to identify clusters, metal production and the intracluster medium, galaxy evolution in the cluster environment and group-cluster connections. With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this volume is appropriate both as an introduction to this topic for physics and astronomy graduate students, and as a reference source for professional research astronomers.

The twentieth century witnessed some remarkable discoveries: the 1917 publication of Einstein's general theory of relativity, Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble's 1929 discovery of the expansion of the universe, evidence for the existence of dark matter, and the discovery of a mysterious dark energy, which is causing the universe to speed up its expansion. This comprehensive volume reviews the theory and measurement of various parameters related to the evolution of the universe. Topics include inflation, string theory, the history of cosmology in the context of measurements being made of the Hubble constant, the matter density, and dark energy, including observational results from the Sloan, Digital Sky Survey, Keck, Magellan, cosmic microwave background experiments, Hubble space telescope and Chandra. With chapters by leading authorities in the field, this book is a valuable resource for graduate students and professional research astronomers.