Astronomy: A Beginner's Guide to the Universe Plus Masteringastronomy -- Access Card Package

For one-semester Introduction to Astronomy courses.

With Astronomy: A Beginner’s Guide, Seventh Edition, the briefer version of their two seminal textbooks, trusted authors Eric Chaisson and Steve McMillan continue to emphasize three major themes: the process of science, the size and scale of the universe, and the evolution of the cosmos. In the Seventh Edition, Chaisson and McMillan ignite your interest with increased coverage of the most exciting, current discoveries in astronomy and create a bridge to scientific understanding with student-friendly art and better learning tools.

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 natural science and conducts research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Eric has written twelve books on astronomy, which have received such literary awards as the Phi Beta Kappa Prize, two American Institute of Physics Awards, and Harvard’s Smith-Weld Prize for Literary Merit. He has published nearly 200 scientific papers in professional journals, some of which won him Harvard’s B. J. Bok Prize for original contributions to astrophysics.

Steve McMillan

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 post-doctoral positions at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, where he continued his research in theoretical astrophysics, star clusters, and numerical modeling. 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 in the Netherlands. He has published more than 90 scientific papers in professional journals.

BRIEF CONTENTS

0. Charting the Heavens: The Foundations of Astronomy

I. FOUNDATIONS

1. The Copernican Revolution: The Birth of Modern Science

2. Light and Matter: The Inner Workings of the Cosmos

3. Telescopes: The Tools of Astronomy

II. OUR PLANETARY SYSTEM

4. The Solar System: Interplanetary Matter and the Birth of the Planets

5. Earth and Its Moon: Our Cosmic Backyard

6. The Terrestrial Planets: A Study in Contrasts

7. The Jovian Planets: Giants of the Solar System

8. Moons, Rings, and Plutoids: Small Worlds Among Giants

III. THE STARS

9. The Sun: Our Parent Star

10. Measuring the Stars: Giants, Dwarfs, and the Main Sequence

11. The Interstellar Medium: Star Formation in the Milky Way

12. Stellar Evolution: The Lives and Deaths of Stars

13. Neutron Stars and Black Holes: Strange States of Matter

IV. GALAXIES AND THE UNIVERSE

14. The Milky Way Galaxy: A Spiral in Space

15. Normal and Active Galaxies: Building Blocks of the Universe

16. Hubble’s Law and Dark Matter: The Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos

17. Cosmology: The Big Bang and the Fate of the Universe

18. Life in the Universe: Are We Alone?