Order and Chaos in Dynamical Astronomy by George Contopoulos
English | PDF | 2002 | 633 Pages | ISBN : 3540433600 | 57.8 MB
There have been many books on Dynamical Astronomy up to now. Many are devoted to Celestial Mechanics, but there are also several books on Stellar and Galactic Dynamics. The first books on stellar dynamics dealt mainly with the statistics of stellar motions (e. g. Smart's "Stellar Dynamics" (1938), or Trumpler and Weaver's "Statistical Astronomy" (1953)). A classical book in this field is Chandrasekhar's "Principles of Stellar Dynamics" (1942) that dealt mainly with the time of relaxation, the solutions of Liouville's equation, and the dynamics of clusters. In the Dover edition of this book (1960) an extended Appendix was added, containing the statistical mechanics of stellar systems, a quite "modern" subject at that time. The need for a classroom book was covered for several years by the book of Mihalas and Routly "Galactic Astronomy" (1969).