An Introduction to Galaxies and Cosmology 2nd Edition

I found AN INTRODUCTION TO GALAXIES AND COSMOLOGY to be an excellent book!It is especially geared to a person who wants more than just a superficial description of this branch of astronomy and yet it avoids complex mathematics making it perfect for a person who does not need to see the mathematical step-by-step development of all the equations involved in the topic.The book consists of 2 parts:Part 1 (Chapters 1-4) has a detailed discussion of the structures of our own Milky Way Galaxy and goes on to introduce normal and active galaxies.Part 2 (Chapters 5-8) gets into the wide range of Cosmological Models and discusses the Big Bang and expansion of the Universe.Chapter titles are:Ch1 The Milky Way-Our GalaxyCh2 Normal GalaxiesCh3 Active GalaxiesCh4 The Spacial Distribution of GalaxiesCh5 Introducing Cosmology-The Science of the UniverseCh6 Big Bang CosmologyCh7 Observational Cosmology- Measuring the UniverseCh8 Questioning Cosmology- Problems About the UniverseAlthough the book avoids showing the complex mathematics behind important formulas, it does not neglect showing many formulas and gives student exercises using them to calculate various important quantities. Full solutions to each one are given in the back of the book.The book correctly advertises itself as being understandable to anyone who has completed beginning undergraduate physics courses. The book does not require calculus in its problem solving.I highly recommend it!

One would believe University level book. Great book for Telescope Addition. In Example: Star[s] Galaxie[s], Universal Existence[s], v[s] Distance[s], Movie[s] Manufacturing[s], Ect.

Arrived on time. In good condition. Was just as described. Thank you.

I think this is a great intermediate level book on galaxies and cosmology. The writing style is clear and easy to follow. There are many useful diagrams and a fair number of beautiful images.The first part of the book focuses on galaxies. The Milky Way is the subject of the first chapter. In addition to providing a nice description of the galaxy we live in, a lot of concepts are introduced that are needed for the remainder of the book. This includes things like globular clusters, open clusters, density waves, stellar halos, HR diagrams, rotation curves and dark matter.This is followed by a chapter on normal galaxies. The Hubble classification of galaxies is covered here. The treatment goes beyond morphology, it also describes the properties these classifications have (for example mass to gas ratio) and how they are measured. A very high level view of structure formation is given. This topic is treated in more detail in the cosmology part. The extremely important topic of the cosmological distance ladder is covered.The following chapter on active galaxies is excellent. In addition to describing the types of active galaxies, it explains the current models of how they are powered. It also provides reasons for thinking that they are fundamentally the same kind of thing, just being viewed in different ways by us. This is followed by a chapter on the large scale distribution of galaxies which provides a nice transition to the study of cosmology.The cosmology part is equal in quality to the galaxies part. It opens with a qualitative discussion of general relativity. Obviously it isn't very detailed, the most complicated part presented is the Robertson-Walker line element. However it's enough to motivate important things like the cosmological redshift, the cosmological constant and the critical density. This basic material is built upon to discus dark matter (both baryonic and non-baryonic), structure formation, anisotropies in the microwave background (the detail here was more than I expected form an introductory book, it actually went a bit into multipole expansions), problems with the standard cosmology (standard here meaning pre-inflation, today it would probably be safe to say that inflation is now the standard) and inflation (no details to speak of, just qualitative).In summary I think this is a great book, suitable for students without any previous knowledge of the topics. Most of the concepts from astronomy needed are described, but not covered in detail. This includes things like population I/II/III starts, variable stars and what astronomers mean when they say "metal". This is a lot of information for someone without any background in astronomy. Such people would probably have a fairly tough time following the presentation, but could probably still do it with sufficient motivation. I would expect the best audience would be undergraduate astronomy students. More advanced students would probably be familiar with most of the material, but may still enjoy it because the presentation is so good.