The thrilling sequel to In the Orbit of Sirens THE WORLD OF KAMARIA WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. In the aftermath of the brutal slaying of a sacred auk'nai deity, Cade and Nella Castus are taken from their home and brought deep into the wilderness. They must make their way back to civilization, traversing dangerous landscapes as they are pursued relentlessly by their captor-a winged abomination. As Denton and Eliana search for their missing children, they uncover something that will change life on Kamaria forever.

This thesis describes the application of a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code to accretion disc winds in two types of systems spanning 9 orders of magnitude in mass and size. In both cases, the results provide important new insights. On small scales, the presence of disc winds in accreting white dwarf binary systems has long been inferred from the presence of ultraviolet absorption lines. Here, the thesis shows that the same winds can also produce optical emission lines and a recombination continuum. On large scales, the thesis constructs a simple model of disc winds in quasars that is capable of explaining both the observed absorption and emission signatures – a crucial advance that supports a disc-wind based unification scenario for quasars. Lastly, the thesis also includes a theoretical investigation into the equivalent width distribution of the emission lines in quasars, which reveals a major challenge to all unification scenarios.

Nightmarish machines have driven humanity into the depths of space. The survivors are forced to adapt to a planet filled with monsters.

As a result of significant research over the past 20 years, black holes are now linked to some of the most spectacular and exciting phenomena in the Universe, ranging in size from those that have the same mass as stars to the super-massive objects that lie at the heart of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. This book first introduces the properties of simple isolated holes, then adds in complications like rotation, accretion, radiation, and magnetic fields, finally arriving at a basic understanding of how these immense engines work. Black Hole Astrophysics • reviews our current knowledge of cosmic black holes and how they generate the most powerful observed pheonomena in the Universe; • highlights the latest, most up-to-date theories and discoveries in this very active area of astrophysical research; • demonstrates why we believe that black holes are responsible for important phenomena such as quasars, microquasars and gammaray bursts; • explains to the reader the nature of the violent and spectacular outfl ows (winds and jets) generated by black hole accretion.

This book is intended to be a course about the creation and evolution of the universe at large, including the basic macroscopic building blocks (galaxies) and the overall large-scale structure. This text covers a broad range of topics for a graduate-level class in a physics department where students' available credit hours for astrophysics classes are limited. The sections cover galactic structure, external galaxies, galaxy clustering, active galaxies, general relativity and cosmology.