This Festschrift dedicated to the 60th birth anniversary of Prof. Sandip K. Chakrabarti, a well-known Indian astrophysicist, presents a collection of contributions by about fifty scientists who work on diverse topics in contemporary astrophysics and space science including new and low-cost balloon borne experiments, planetary science, astrochemistry and the origin of life, ionospheric research and earthquake predictions, relativistic astrophysics around black holes, and finally, the observational signatures and radiative properties of compact objects. All the authors are well known scholars in their respective subject and are all PhD students of Prof. Sandip K. Chakrabarti. The book demonstrates a two-dimensional evolution of research areas triggered by Sandip Chakrabarti over the past few decades. The first dimension represents the evolution and diversification of Chakrabarti’s own research in which new students were trained. A second dimension arises from the evolution of the research topics pursued by Chakrabarti’s fifty odd doctoral students, many of whom have become renowned scientists in their own right, after starting with a certain subject under Chakrabarti and then migrating to completely new subjects with dexterity. The editors have compiled and edited the articles appropriately to some extent to suit the spirit of this Festschrift on the one hand and to keep balance in diverse topics on the other. Thus this volume also provides an overview for whosoever wishes to enter the important subjects of compact objects, astrochemistry, ionospheric science or space exploration in near space. New graduates, PhD scholars, teachers and researchers will benefit from this volume. Moreover it is a record of tremendous success of a school in a range of vast topics.

Being a vital modern technology, satellite systems for navigation, telecommunication, and geosciences have developed rapidly in the last 25 years. Modern satellite technologies have become a base of our civilization and support our day-to-day activity in both practice and geosciences. This book is devoted to GNSS-remote sensing for ionosphere research, modeling and mitigation techniques to diminish the ionosphere and multipath impacts on GNSS, and survey of the modern satellite missions and technologies. We hope that the experts’ opinions presented in the book will be interesting for the research community and students in the area of satellites and space missions as well as in engineering and geoscience research.

The proceedings of MG16 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 46 plenary presentations, 3 public lectures, 5 round tables and 81 parallel sessions arranged during the intense six-day online meeting. All talks were recorded and are available on the ICRANet YouTube channel at the following link: www.icranet.org/video_mg16.These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many contributions made at the meeting. They contain 383 papers, among which 14 come from the plenary sessions.The material represented in these proceedings cover the following topics: accretion, active galactic nuclei, alternative theories of gravity, black holes (theory, observations and experiments), binaries, boson stars, cosmic microwave background, cosmic strings, dark energy and large scale structure, dark matter, education, exact solutions, early universe, fundamental interactions and stellar evolution, fast transients, gravitational waves, high energy physics, history of relativity, neutron stars, precision tests, quantum gravity, strong fields, and white dwarf; all of them represented by a large number of contributions.The online e-proceedings are published in an open access format.

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity.

A coherent introduction for researchers in astronomy, particle physics, and cosmology on the formation and evolution of galaxies.