Principles of Astrophysics

Abstract

This book is designed to show how physical principles can be used at the advanced undergraduate level to understand astronomical systems such as planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. It emerges from a pair of courses at Rutgers University that attract not just astrophysics students but a broad audience of physics and engineering students. The organization is therefore “physics-first”: we start with key principles of physics and then examine applications to astronomical systems. At Rutgers, each half of the book constitutes a coherent semester-length course; while there is a little overlap (notably with cosmology in Chaps. 11 and 20), the two halves are largely independent and complementary. Part I focuses on gravity, because this is the dominant force in many astronomical systems and it governs many types of motions we observe. The goal of Chaps. 2–11 is to develop a progressively richer understanding of gravity and the way astrophysicists use gravitational motion to investigate mass.