Bücher der Reihe SpringerBriefs in Astronomy

Measuring the spin distribution of supermassive black holes is of critical importance for understanding how these black holes and their host galaxies form and evolve over time, yet this type of study is only in its infancy. This brief describes how astronomers measure spin in supermassive black holes using X-ray spectroscopy.

This book presents the exceptional biography of the 20th century Chinese astronomer Cheng Maolan, who came to France in 1926 on a China-France cooperation program to do his PhD with the idea of returning to China after a few years. Instead, he lived two lives. He first stayed in France and studied astronomy in Lyon, the ¿Silk city¿, where he suffered the hardships of the German occupation, but also witnessed the construction of the Haute-Provence Observatory. After the war, he started a promising career at Lyon Observatory. However, in 1957 he decided to live a second life, by returning to the motherland, which had in the meantime become the People's Republic of China. There, he suffered the hardships of the Cultural Revolution, but he managed to play a pivotal role in establishing the Beijing Observatory as its director. In particular, he prepared the ground for the Xinglong 2-m telescope, which saw its first light in 1989, ten years after his death. Cheng Maolan is now considered a "Chinese hero": an "Astronomy and Technology Museum" was built and named after him in 2018, in his native city of Boye, Hebei Province, China, featuring a tall, white statue in front of the building.

This book provides a pedagogical introduction to the likely sources of these neutrinos, their propagation and detection mechanisms. Above a few tens of TeVs, neutrinos are conceived as more reliable messengers for astronomy than photons as these photons get absorbed in the background photon field.

This SpringerBrief summarizes the latest relevant research and discoveries that have been made in the area of ringed small bodies and small body taxonomy, including those that lay the groundwork for future discoveries.

It is now clear that a binary evolutionary pathway is responsible for a significant fraction of all planetary nebulae, with some authors even going so far as to claim that binarity may be a near requirement for the formation of an observable nebula.

It describes the control systems used to point the telescope and operate its cameras and spectrographs, as well as the web-based tools used to plan those observations. Readers will learn about existing software tools and packages, develop their own software tools, and analyze real data sets.

Electrical processes take place in all planetary atmospheres. The conditions necessary for a global atmospheric electric circuit similar to Earth's, and the likelihood of meeting these conditions in other planetary atmospheres, are briefly discussed.

What does existing scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, meteorology and biology tell us about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life and civilizations?

The combined compositional data of relatively high volatiles (S, K), relatively low refractories (Al, Ca), and low crustal iron, combined with an active, partially molten iron rich core, has major implications for Mercury and Solar System formation.

Since Luna and Lunar Orbiter photographed the far side of the Moon, the mysterious dichotomy between the face of the Moon as we see it from Earth and the side of the Moon that is hidden has puzzled lunar scientists.

In this "SpringerBrief" the author considers the underlying problems and questions that are common to numerical models of turbulence in different astrophysical systems.

In this SpringerBrief, Space Weather and Coronal Mass Ejections, author Timothy Howard briefly introduces the coronal mass ejection, its scientific importance, and its relevance to space weather at Earth and other planets.

Beyond the four centuries of sunspot observation, our knowledge of solar history depends on analogy with main sequence stars, on modelling, and on indirect measures of solar activity. This title includes the analysis of lunar rocks and meteorites for evidence of solar flares and other components of the solar cosmic-ray flux, and more.

Modern computer power and high-precision observational data have greatly improved the reliability of meteoroid stream models.

The theoretical description of star formation is shown in simplified and state-of-the-art numerical simulations, describing in a more clear way how feedback from massive stars can trigger star and planet formation.