Synopses & Reviews
A timely and authoritative synthesis of our understanding of activity cycles in the Sun and similar stars for graduate students and researchers.
Review
"...an excellent introduction to the subject of solar-stellar activity for graduate students and non-specialists." Steve Skinner, COOLNEWS"...Wilson has provided the university student and postgraduate with a perfect mixture of what is known and what is still to be found out. There are detailed discussions about topics, such as coronal holes, polar reversals, large-scale fields, non-linear dynamos, helioseismology, isorotational surfaces, the question of whether the sunspot cycle is chaotic, activity predictions and the general aperiodicity of solar activity. Not only is the book produced, illustrated and referenced to the high quality of the Cambridge Astrophysics Series, it is also extremely readable." Nature"...contains current material and therefore is a necessary purchase for libraries that serve researchers and professionals in astrophysics." Choice"...ably recounts the story of our search for understanding how the sun produces its spots and its stumbling cycle of magnetic activity....makes interesting reading. It describes engagingly and with authority the complex phenomena associated with solar and stellar activity cycles, and the various attempts to construct analytic or numeric 'models' describing how the cycle works....[A]ny reader will get a good feel for the history, excitement, and present state of the search to understand what makes the sun and similar stars behave the way they do." Robert W. Noyes, Science
Review
'Wilson has provided the university student and postgraduate with a perfect mixture of what is known and what is still to be found. Not only is the book produced, illustrated and referenced to normal high quality of the Cambridge Astrophysics Series, it is also extremely readable.' Nature
Table of Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Historical survey; 3. The structure of the Sun and the phenomena of activity; 4. The equations of magnetohydrodynamics and magnetostatics; 5. The one-dimensional configuration of the cycle; 6. Heuristic models of the solar cycle; 7. Stellar activity and activity cycles; 8. The two-dimensional representation of the extended activity cycle; 9. The origin of the large-scale fields; 10. The reversals of the polar magnetic fields; 11. The role of dynamo theory in cyclic activity; 12. Helioseismology and the solar cycle; 13. Chaos and the cycle; 14. Forecasting the cycle; 15. Summary and conclusion.