Edith Alicia Müller (1918-1995) was the IAU General Secretary from 1976 to 1979, the first woman to have this responsibility. Many friends, students and colleagues, and others who have met Edith at different occasions, give in this book their memories of her. Her fundamental work in solar physics concerned the chemical composition of the Sun, the time variation of its infra-red spectrum, and its thermal structure. Her interests were, however, far broader than that. She was heavily involved in international work for the teaching of astronomy and for the exchange program of young astronomers.

Seen from “inside the IAU,” this book tells the in-depth story of a major crisis in which China “divorced” from the International Astronomical Union in 1960 as a protest against the admission of Taiwan. This happened to all the scientific unions at the same time, and to the Olympic Games, which, unexpectedly, would serve as a laboratory for the “reconciliation” which took place following the re-opening of China to the world 20 years later. The so-called “China conflict” is the most important crisis in the post-WWII history of the IAU. Yet, many details about this conflict and its links to broader geopolitical events have long remained unsettled, obscure, or altogether absent. In particular, the book describes for the first time the “separation” period, which covered the Cultural Revolution, and in which the IAU made desperate official efforts to reach out to China, while some groups of Western and Chinese astronomers managed to keep contact at times. On the occasion of the IAU Centenary celebrations in 2019, the book revisits this painful succession of events using unpublished documents from the IAU Archives and the International Council of Scientific Unions. The book also contains supplementary typescripts of selected handwritten correspondences and the full translation of key original Chinese documents unknown to readers outside China. What emerges is a complex and fascinating story of human relations and science diplomacy under the shadow of the Cold War. Readers will learn how the 20-year “China conflict” as lived by astronomers and scientists is important not only for the history of the IAU, but also for the history of contemporary China. “This book is full of so many original documents of the IAU office, very reliable and good to open to the public readers.” Shuhua Ye, Shanghai Observatory (IAU Vice-President, 1988-1994) This book is a companion book to "Astronomers as Diplomats," published at the same time in the same series.

Proceedings of the Joint Discussion-17 at the 23rd IAU General Assembly, organised by the Commission 41, held in Kyoto, Japan, August 25-26, 1997

Proceedings of the second Hellenic Cosmology Meeting, held in the National Observatory of Athens (Penteli, 19-20 April 2001)

Space exploration and advanced astronomy have dramatically expanded our knowledge of outer space and made it possible to study the indepth mechanisms underlying various natural phenomena caused by complex interaction of physical-chemical and dynamical processes in the universe. Huge breakthroughs in astrophysics and the planetary s- ences have led to increasingly complicated models of such media as giant molecular clouds giving birth to stars, protoplanetary accretion disks associated with the solar system’s formation, planetary atmospheres and circumplanetary space. The creation of these models was promoted by the development of basic approaches in modern - chanics and physics paralleled by the great advancement in the computer sciences. As a result, numerous multidimensional non-stationary problems involving the analysis of evolutionary processes can be investigated using wide-range numerical experiments. Turbulence belongs to the most widespread and, at the same time, the most complicated natural phenomena, related to the origin and development of organized structures (- dies of different scale) at a definite flow regime of fluids in essentially non-linear - drodynamic systems. This is also one of the most complex and intriguing sections of the mechanics of fluids. The direct numerical modeling of turbulent flows encounters large mathematical difficulties, while the development of a general turbulence theory is hardly possible because of the complexity of interacting coherent structures. Three-dimensional non-steady motions arise in such a system under loss of la- nar flow stability defined by the critical value of the Reynolds number.

Mergers are the mechanisms by which galaxy clusters are assembled through the hierarchical growth of smaller clusters and groups. Major cluster mergers are the most energetic events in the Universe since the Big Bang. Many of the observed properties of clusters depend on the physics of the merging process. These include substructure, shock, intra cluster plasma temperature and entropy structure, mixing of heavy elements within the intra cluster medium, acceleration of high-energy particles, formation of radio halos and the effects on the galaxy radio emission. This book reviews our current understanding of cluster merging from an observational and theoretical perspective, and is appropriate for both graduate students and researchers in the field.