The Book
What will happen to a star when its supply of nuclear energy is exhausted? Will it collapse to a point and disappear from this Universe? Or, is there a new twist to the story?
In this book, the second volume of the series ‘The Present Revolution in Astronomy’ authored by G Srinivasan, the story of the life history of the stars is narrated in a lucid manner, with the necessary physics background developed in a systematic fashion. The first part deals with the great developments of the 1930s. This includes the great discovery by Chandrasekhar and the subsequent prediction of supernovae, neutron stars and black holes. The second part of the book is devoted to a discussion of the modern perspective of stellar evolution.
I know of no other book on the evolution of stars of a similar scope and breadth that is so accessible for undergraduate students.
E P J van den Heuvel
Professor of Astrophysics
University of Amsterdam, The Netherland
Listen to author's talk on Youtube
The Author(s)
G Srnivasan began his career as a solid state physicist and later switched to astrophysics. After his PhD at the University of Chicago, he worked at the IBM Research Laboratory, Zurich, Switzerland; Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden; Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge; and Raman Research Institute, Bangalore. He is a Past President of the Astronomical Society of India, as well as the Division of Space and High Energy Astrophysics of the International Astronomical Union. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a former Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Part 1: A Historical Perspective
Chapter 1 What Are the Stars?
Chapter 2 Stars in Their Youth
Chapter 3 White Dwarf Stars
Chapter 4 The Principles of Statistical Mechanics
Chapter 5 Fermi–Dirac Distribution
Chapter 6 Quantum Stars
Chapter 7 The Chandrasekhar Limit
Chapter 8 The Absurd Behaviour of Stars: Not All Stars Will Have Energy to Cool
Chapter 9 Guest Stars
Chapter 10 Supernovae, Neutron Stars and Black Holes
A Profile of Chandra
Part II: The Life History of Stars—A Modern Perspective
Chapter 11 To Burn or Not To Burn
Chapter 12 What Does the Future Hold for the Sun?
Chapter 13 Life History of Intermediate Mass Stars
Chapter 14 Diamonds in the Sky
Chapter 15 Exploding Stars
Epilogue
Suggested Reading
Index