Intended as a general survey for the non-science major. Topics include the structure and evolution of stars from birth to exotic final stages, such as red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars and black holes. Features of galaxies and quasars, cosmology, and the Big Bang theory.
Download White dwarfs black holes an introduction to relativistic astrophysics
Special relativity, equivalence principle, and fundamental experiments. Mathematics of curved spacetime. General structure of Einstein's equations. Observational tests. Applications of general relativity, relativistic stellar structure, gravitational collapse and black holes.
Mass-radius diagram of semiclassical relativistic stars with \(\rho =10^-5\). The black line represents the compactness parameter of black holes \((C_R=1)\), the dashed red line denotes the Buchdahl compactness bound \((C_R=8/9)\), and the dashed green line is the minimum compactness of objects that exhibit a photon sphere \((C_R=1/3)\). The blue curve represents semiclassical relativistic stars. For stars surpassing the Buchdahl limit, the total mass M grows approximately linearly with the radius R. Each point within the blue curve admits entire families of regulator functions F for which the whole geometry is regular.
High energy astrophysics studies the most violent and energetic events in the Universe: the explosions of stars, matter falling into black holes, the most luminous explosions after the Big Bang: gamma ray bursts. In this course, we will first lay down the physics involved, studying radiative processes and the fluid dynamics of shocks, and then we will move on to study specific objects: supernova remnants, neutron stars and white dwarfs, accreting black holes.
As the title suggests, you can't expect to master a significant fraction of the basicnotions of GR in this book, but what Geroch does cover here is very well explained. A beautifully illustrated and very gentle introduction to the geometry of Minkowskispacetime of SR and then to the curved spacetimes of GR, including a clear intuitivediscussion of some features of Schwarzschild geometry (nonrotating uncharged black holes),by a leading physicist.
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