This authoritative book presents the theoretical development of gravitational physics as it applies to the dynamics of celestial bodies and the analysis of precise astronomical observations. In so doing, it fills the need for a textbook that teaches modern dynamical astronomy with a strong emphasis on the relativistic aspects of the subject produced by the curved geometry of four-dimensional spacetime. The first three chapters review the fundamental principles of celestial mechanics and of special and general relativity. This background material forms the basis for understanding relativistic reference frames, the celestial mechanics of N-body systems, and high-precision astrometry, navigation, and geodesy, which are then treated in the following five chapters. The final chapter provides an overview of the new field of applied relativity, based on recent recommendations from the International Astronomical Union. The book is suitable for teaching advanced undergraduate honors programs and graduate courses, while equally serving as a reference for professional research scientists working in relativity and dynamical astronomy. The authors bring their extensive theoretical and practical experience to the subject. Sergei Kopeikin is a professor at the University of Missouri, while Michael Efroimsky and George Kaplan work at the United States Naval Observatory, one of the world?s premier institutions for expertise in astrometry, celestial mechanics, and timekeeping.

In the last 20 years, researchers in the field of celestial mechanics have achieved spectacular results in their effort to understand the structure and evolution of our solar system. Modern Celestial Mechanics uses a solid theoretical basis to describe recent results on solar system dynamics, and it emphasizes the dynamics of planets and of small bodies. To grasp celestial mechanics, one must comprehend the fundamental concepts of Hamiltonian systems theory, so this volume begins with an explanation of those concepts. Celestial mechanics itself is then considered, including the secular motion of planets and small bodies and mean motion resonances. Graduate students and researchers of astronomy and astrophysics will find Modern Celestial Mechanics an essential addition to their bookshelves.

Surveying key developments and open issues in cosmology for graduate students and researchers, this book focuses on the general concepts and relations that underpin the standard model of the Universe. It also examines anisotropic and inhomogeneous models, and deeper issues, such as quantum cosmology and the multiverse proposal.

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once — setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.

Einstein's general theory of relativity is widely considered to be one of the most elegant and successful scientific theories ever developed, and it is increasingly being taught in a simplified form at advanced undergraduate level within both physics and mathematics departments. Due to the increasing interest in gravitational physics, in both the academic and the public sphere, driven largely by widely-publicised developments such as the recent observations of gravitational waves, general relativity is also one of the most popular scientific topics pursued through self-study. Modern General Relativity introduces the reader to the general theory of relativity using an example-based approach, before describing some of its most important applications in cosmology and astrophysics, such as gamma-ray bursts, neutron stars, black holes, and gravitational waves. With hundreds of worked examples, explanatory boxes, and end-of-chapter problems, this textbook provides a solid foundation for understanding one of the towering achievements of twentieth-century physics.

Spacetime physics -- Physics in flat spacetime -- The mathematics of curved spacetime -- Einstein's geometric theory of gravity -- Relativistic stars -- The universe -- Gravitational collapse and black holes -- Gravitational waves -- Experimental tests of general relativity -- Frontiers