Thirty years ago when Sir Richard Branson called up Boeing and asked if they had a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically transform the placid business of air travel. But today, Branson flies airlines on six continents, employs hundreds of jets and, in 2014, was predicting that his spaceship company – Virgin Galactic – would soon open the space frontie…
Describes the instruments and initial results of the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS) at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. This collection of papers describes the instrument and initial results obtained from the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS), one of the post-focus instruments of the 1.6 meter New Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. The FISS primarily aims at inves…
Provides a comprehensive summary on the physical models and current theory of black hole accretion, growth and mergers, in both the supermassive and stellar-mass cases. This title reviews in-depth research on accretion on all scales, from galactic binaries to intermediate mass and supermassive black holes. Possible future directions of accretion are also discussed. The following main themes …
This thesis presents fundamental work that explains two mysteries concerning the trajectory of interplanetary spacecraft. For the first problem, the so-called Pioneer anomaly, a wholly new and innovative method was developed for computing all contributions to the acceleration due to onboard thermal sources. Through a careful analysis of all parts of the spacecraft Pioneer 10 and 11, the applica…
This thesis describes the studies on the solar interior where turbulent thermal convection plays an important role. The author solved, for the first time, one of the long-standing issues in solar physics, i.e., the maintenance mechanism of the solar differential rotation in the near-surface shear layer. The author attacked this problem with a newly developed approach, the reduced speed of sound…
This final entry in the History of Human Space Exploration mini-series by Ben Evans continues with an in-depth look at the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the new millennium. Picking up where Partnership in Space left off, the story commemorating the evolution of manned space exploration unfolds in further detail. More than fifty years after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey …
Young addresses the impressive expansion across existing and developing commercial space business markets, with multiple private companies competing in the payload launch services sector. The author pinpoints the new markets, technologies, and players in the industry, as well as highlighting the overall reasons why it is important for us to develop space. NASA now relies on commercial partners …
This book provides a general introduction to the rapidly developing astrophysical frontier of stellar tidal disruption, but also details original thesis research on the subject. This work has shown that recoiling black holes can disrupt stars far outside a galactic nucleus, errors in the traditional literature have strongly overestimated the maximum luminosity of “deeply plunging” tidal di…
A collection of papers edited by four experts in the field, this book sets out to describe the way solar activity is manifested in observations of the solar interior, the photosphere, the chromosphere, the corona and the heliosphere. The 11-year solar activity cycle, more generally known as the sunspot cycle, is a fundamental property of the Sun. This phenomenon is the generation and evolution …