Astronomy, space and time

Since the 1960s, astrophysical discoveries have blossomed, due to the emergence of powerful and new observational tools.

This book presents Special Relativity in a language accessible to students while avoiding the burdens of geometry, tensor calculus, space-time symmetries, and the introduction of four vectors.

This book explores the once popular idea of 'Flexible Path' in terms of Mars, a strategy that would focus on a manned orbital mission to Mars's moons rather than the more risky, expensive and time-consuming trip to land humans on the Martian surface.

This thesis describes advances in the understanding of HgCdTe detectors.

This SpringerBrief explores the technological, economic, physiological, and psychological comparisons between a journey to the Moon versus a journey to Mars, taking into consideration the national and international perspectives at play.

The 1846 discovery of Neptune is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of science and astronomy.

The Mars Curiosity Rover is the most sophisticated mobile laboratory ever deployed on a planet.

This book, now in its third edition, offers a practical guide to the use of probability and statistics in experimental physics that is of value for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

This book highlights selected contributions presented at the 15th annual international symposium Frontiers of Fundamental Physics (FFP15), with the aim of informing readers about the most important recent advances in fundamental physics and physics education research.

Life support systems are an integral part of crewed spacecraft designs and habitation systems.

The three neutrinos are ghostly elementary particles that exist all across the Universe.

Africa faces numerous challenges relating to good governance due to its vast and diverse landscape, as well as its history.

Every second of every day, we are exposed to billions of neutrinos emitted by the Sun, and yet they seem to pass straight through us with no apparent effect at all.

This book aims to integrate, in a pedagogical and technical manner, with detailed derivations, all essential principles of fundamental theoretical physics as developed over the past 100 years.

This book offers a vision of how evolutionary life processes can be modelled.

Written by a leading expert on comets, this textbook is divided into seven main elements with a view to allowing advanced students to appreciate the interconnections between the different elements.

Like planets in our solar system, exoplanets form, evolve, and interact with their host stars in many ways.

This book presents a novel mathematical formalism, based on the tetrad formulation of differential geometry, for describing cosmological observables exactly and conveniently.

Based on 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations performed with unprecedented high resolution, this book examines the giant impacts that dominate many planets' late accretion and evolution.

Starting out from humankind's earliest ideas about the cosmos, this book gives the reader a clear overview of our current understanding of the universe, including big bang theories and the formation of stars and galaxies, as well as addressing open questions.

Long before humans wrote, we painted.

This book analyses the magnificent imperial necropolises of ancient China from the perspective of Archaeoastronomy, a science which takes into account the landscape in which ancient monuments are placed, focusing especially but not exclusively on the celestial aspects.

This book is devoted to the most relevant issues in crystal chemistry and mineral typomorphism; the structure, physico-chemical and technological properties of minerals; and the computational modeling of mineral structure and properties.

Astronomy in the Inca Empire was a robust and fundamental practice.

This book is an invaluable guide to calibrating any infrared spectrum using noble gases as a reference.

This book is for amateur astronomers who would like to know the mythology behind the names of astronomical objects in the night sky.

This book traces the development of Kepler's ideas along with his unsteady wanderings in a world dominated by religious turmoil.

This volume of the series Springer Briefs in Space Life Sciences explains the physics and biology of radiation in space, defines various forms of cosmic radiation and their dosimetry, and presents a range of exposure scenarios.

This book consolidates the latest research on the Hadean Eon - the first 500 million years of Earth history - which has permitted hypotheses of early Earth evolution to be tested, including geophysical models that include the possibility of plate tectonic-like behavior.

Unofficially they called themselves the TFNG, or the Thirty-Five New Guys.

This book describes the discovery of quasicrystals (icosahedral and decagonal) in an extraterrestrial rock from the Koryak Mountains of Far Eastern Russia.

Translated from the original French and annotated with figures, historical maps and commentary from the translators, this work is Jean-Charles Houzeau's account of his escape from Texas during the American Civil War.

Unlike most traditional introductory textbooks on relativity and cosmology that answer questions like "e;Does accelerated expansion pull our bodies apart?

Astrobiology not only investigates how early life took hold of our planet but also life on other planets - both in our Solar System and beyond -  and their potential for habitability.

There are many books covering different facets of astrophotography, but few of them contain all the necessary steps for beginners in one accessible place.

This book focuses on one mechanism in black hole physics which has proven to be universal, multifaceted and with a rich phenomenology: rotational superradiance.

This is a second edition of a textbook that provides the first comprehensive, easy-to-read, and up-to-date account of the fascinating discipline of archaeoastronomy, in which the relationship between ancient constructions and the sky is studied in order to gain a better understanding of the ideas of the architects of the past and of their religious and symbolic worlds.

These three lectures cover a certain aspect of complexity and black holes, namely the relation to the second law of thermodynamics.

This work is an introduction to the totality of the metaphysical philosophy of nature of Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966).

The revised and updated 2nd edition of this established textbook provides a self-contained introduction to the general theory of relativity, describing not only the physical principles and applications of the theory, but also the mathematics needed, in particular the calculus of differential forms.

This edited volume charts the history of celestial navigation over the course of five centuries.

The observational component of astronomy is an exciting and vital part of any astrophysics degree.

The development of science has been an ideological struggle that lasted over three millennia.

Dawkin's militant atheism is well known; his profound faith less well known In this book, atheist philosopher Eric Steinhart explores the spiritual dimensions of Richard Dawkins' books, which are shown to encompass:*       the meaning and purpose of life*       an appreciation of Platonic beauty and truth*       a deep belief in the rationality of the universe*       an aversion to both scientism and nihilism As an atheist, Dawkins strives to develop a scientific alternative to theism, and while he declares that science is not a religion, he also proclaims it to be a spiritual enterprise.

In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary volume, former NASA Chief Historian Steven Dick reflects on the exploration of space, astrobiology and its implications, cosmic evolution, astronomical institutions, discovering and classifying the cosmos, and the philosophy of astronomy.

Modern research has demonstrated that many stars are surrounded by planets-some of which might contain the right conditions to harbor life.

This book presents a collection of chapters, which address various contexts and challenges of the idea of human enhancement for the purposes of human space missions.

Catadioptric telescopes (CATs) such as the Schmidt Cassegrains remain popular among amateur astronomers for their ability to reveal thousands of beautiful deep-space wonders.

This book serves two main purposes: firstly, it shows, in a simple way, how the possible existence of an extra-spatial dimension would affect the predictions of four-dimensional General Relativity, a model known as the Brane world; secondly, it explains, step-by-step, a new technique called Minimal Geometric Deformation, which was introduced for the purpose of solving the correspondingly modified Einstein field equations.

This book is an original study aimed at understanding how vacuum magnetic fields change with time.