Galactic astronomy

Author: Binney (J.), Merrifield (M.) (Auth.), Zhao Gang et al. (Trans.)
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2004-03-01
Features: This book was written as a successor to Mihalas & Binney's Galactic Astronomy, and is the sister volume to Binney & Tremaine's Galactic Dynamics (hereafter BT). Since the publication of Mihalas & Binney's Galactic Astronomy, nearly two decades of rapid scientific progress have passed. During these years, fundamental changes have emerged in the exploration of galaxy research. Telescope and detector technology, as well as the scale of space observatories, have made remarkable advancements, greatly improving the quality of available data, particularly for extragalactic galaxies. Although certain details of galaxy structure still rely on close observations of the Milky Way, the overall picture of galaxies can now be described clearly through observations of other extragalactic galaxies. As a result, the focus of galaxy structure research has shifted toward utilizing the vast amount of existing extragalactic galaxy observations. To reflect this change, this book adopts a different structural design compared to Mihalas & Binney's Galactic Astronomy. Understanding the historical development of galactic astronomy and mastering fundamental astronomical concepts are crucial, hence the first three chapters summarize the history of galactic astronomy, astrometry, and stellar phenomenology. We then directly enter into the morphology of extragalactic galaxies in Chapter 4, presenting images of different types of galaxies in the universe. Chapter 5 reviews current stellar structure and nuclear synthesis theories and their relationship to galaxy age and evolutionary history. A simple application of this theory to star clusters constitutes Chapter 6. Chapter 7 summarizes the somewhat convoluted reasoning used to determine the scale of the universe and estimates fundamental parameters such as galaxy sizes and intergalactic distances. Chapters 8 and 9 focus respectively on the structure and dynamics of the interstellar medium in extragalactic and Milky Way galaxies. The interstellar medium provides rich information for the dynamical and chemical evolution of galaxies, and it also determines the star formation rate within it, significantly affecting the optical appearance of galaxies. Our detailed study of the Milky Way begins in Chapter 9 and continues through Chapter 10, which complements the interstellar medium research in Chapter 9 with a complete picture of the distribution of stars in the Milky Way. Due to the scientific reality of analyzing the motion and chemical composition of stars near the Sun in detail, they receive special attention. Rich information about the dynamics and history of the Milky Way can be obtained from such analyses, and the book concludes in Chapter 11 by summarizing our knowledge of stellar motions in extragalactic galaxies.