For courses in Introductory Astronomy.
Pearson eText offers an affordable, simple-to-use, mobile reading experience that lets instructors and students extend learning beyond class time. Students can study, highlight, and take notes in their Pearson eText on any mobile phone, tablet, or laptop — even when they are offline. Educators can also add their own notes and highlights directly in the eTextbook so that students see what is important for their particular course.
Connects introductory astronomy to a broad understanding of the universe
In this 9th Edition of Astronomy Today, authors Eric Chaisson and Steve McMillan communicate their excitement about astronomy, combining up-to-date science with insightful pedagogy. The text emphasizes visualization, focusing on the process of scientific discovery in order to teach students “how we know what we know.” Updated features in the 9th Edition, Big Pictures and Big Questions, help students connect the content of each chapter with a broader understanding of the universe while piquing student interest in current research. The 9th Edition has also been thoroughly updated and revised to reflect recent discoveries in the field of astronomy.
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Table of Contents:
I. ASTRONOMY AND THE UNIVERSE
1. Charting the Heavens: The Foundations of Astronomy
2. The Copernican Revolution: The Birth of Modern Science
3. Radiation: Information from the Cosmos
4. Spectroscopy: The Inner Workings of Atoms
5. Telescopes: The Tools of Astronomy
II. OUR PLANETARY SYSTEM
6. The Solar System: An Introduction to Comparative Planetology
7. Earth: Our Home in Space
8. The Moon and Mercury: Scorched and Battered Worlds
9. Venus: Earth’s Sister Planet
10. Mars: A Near Miss for Life?
11. Jupiter: Giant of the Solar System
12. Saturn: Spectacular Rings and Mysterious Moons
13. Uranus and Neptune: The Outer Worlds of the Solar System
14. Solar System Debris: Keys to Our Origin
15. The Formation of Planetary Systems: The Solar System and Beyond
III. STARS AND STELLAR EVOLUTION
16. The Sun: Our Parent Star
17. The Stars: Giants, Dwarfs, and the Main Sequence
18. The Interstellar Medium: Gas and Dust among the Stars
19. Star Formation: A Traumatic Birth
20. Stellar Evolution: The Life and Death of a Star
21. Stellar Explosions: Novae, Supernovae, and the Formation of the Elements
22. Neutron Stars and Black Holes: Strange States of Matter
IV. GALAXIES AND COSMOLOGY
23. The Milky Way Galaxy: A Spiral in Space
24. Galaxies: Building Blocks of the Universe
25. Galaxies and Dark Matter: The Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos
26. Cosmology: The Big Bang and the Fate of the Universe
27. The Early Universe: Toward the Beginning of Time
28. Life in the Universe: Are We Alone?
About the Author :
Eric Chaisson holds a Doctorate in Astrophysics from Harvard University, where he spent 10 years on the faculty of Arts and Sciences. For more than two decades thereafter, he served on the senior science staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute and held various professorships at Johns Hopkins and Tufts universities. He is now back at Harvard, where he teaches and conducts research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Eric has written 12 books on astronomy and has published nearly 200 scientific papers in professional journals.
Steve McMillan holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Doctorate in Astronomy from Harvard University. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, where he continued his research in theoretical astrophysics, star clusters, and high-performance computing. Steve is currently Distinguished Professor of Physics at Drexel University and a frequent visiting researcher at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and Leiden University. He has published more than 100 articles and scientific papers in professional journals.
Emily L. Rice, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
Emily holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy and German from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree and doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from UCLA. After completing her Ph.D. she held a postdoctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History, where she is still a resident research associate. Emily is currently Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island and doctoral faculty in physics at the Graduate Center, both part of the City University of New York. In addition to her research on low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets as co-PI of the Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) group, she is the co-author of Astronomy Labs: A Concept Oriented Approach and co-founder of the astronomy fashion blog STARtorialist.
