Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics / 2012 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ eBook that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Planetary Science. The editors have built Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 2012 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Planetary Science in this eBook to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 2012 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics / 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ book that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Planetary Science. The editors have built Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Planetary Science in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Issues in Astronomy and Astrophysics: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

Driven by discoveries, and enabled by leaps in technology and imagination, our understanding of the universe has changed dramatically during the course of the last few decades. The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are making new connections to physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. Based on a broad and comprehensive survey of scientific opportunities, infrastructure, and organization in a national and international context, New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics outlines a plan for ground- and space- based astronomy and astrophysics for the decade of the 2010's. Realizing these scientific opportunities is contingent upon maintaining and strengthening the foundations of the research enterprise including technological development, theory, computation and data handling, laboratory experiments, and human resources. New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics proposes enhancing innovative but moderate-cost programs in space and on the ground that will enable the community to respond rapidly and flexibly to new scientific discoveries. The book recommends beginning construction on survey telescopes in space and on the ground to investigate the nature of dark energy, as well as the next generation of large ground-based giant optical telescopes and a new class of space-based gravitational observatory to observe the merging of distant black holes and precisely test theories of gravity. New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics recommends a balanced and executable program that will support research surrounding the most profound questions about the cosmos. The discoveries ahead will facilitate the search for habitable planets, shed light on dark energy and dark matter, and aid our understanding of the history of the universe and how the earliest stars and galaxies formed. The book is a useful resource for agencies supporting the field of astronomy and astrophysics, the Congressional committees with jurisdiction over those agencies, the scientific community, and the public.

High-energy astrophysics has unveiled a Universe very different from that only known from optical observations. It has revealed many types of objects in which typical variability timescales are as short as years, months, days, and hours (in quasars, X-ray binaries, etc), and even down to milli-seconds in gamma ray bursts. The sources of energy that are encountered are only very seldom nuclear fusion, and most of the time gravitation, a paradox when one thinks that gravitation is, by many orders of magnitude, the weakest of the fundamental interactions. The understanding of these objects' physical conditions and the processes revealed by high-energy astrophysics in the last decades is nowadays part of astrophysicists' culture, even of those active in other domains of astronomy. This book evolved from lectures given to master and PhD students at the University of Geneva since the early 1990s. It aims at providing astronomers and physicists intending to be active in high-energy astrophysics a broad basis on which they should be able to build the more specific knowledge they will need. While in the first part of the book the physical processes are described and derived in detail, the second part studies astrophysical objects in which high-energy astrophysics processes are crucial. This two-pronged approach will help students recognise physical processes by their observational signatures in contexts that may differ widely from those presented here.

Astrostatistical Challenges for the New Astronomy presents a collection of monographs authored by several of the disciplines leading astrostatisticians, i.e. by researchers from the fields of statistics and astronomy-astrophysics, who work in the statistical analysis of astronomical and cosmological data. Eight of the ten monographs are enhancements of presentations given by the authors as invited or special topics in astrostatistics papers at the ISI World Statistics Congress (2011, Dublin, Ireland). The opening chapter, by the editor, was adapted from an invited seminar given at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2011) on the history and current state of the discipline; the second chapter by Thomas Loredo was adapted from his invited presentation at the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy V conference (2011, Pennsylvania State University), presenting insights regarding frequentist and Bayesian methods of estimation in astrostatistical analysis. The remaining monographs are research papers discussing various topics in astrostatistics. The monographs provide the reader with an excellent overview of the current state astrostatistical research, and offer guidelines as to subjects of future research. Lead authors for each chapter respectively include Joseph M. Hilbe (Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arizona State Univ); Thomas J. Loredo (Dept of Astronomy, Cornell Univ); Stefano Andreon (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Italy); Martin Kunz ( Institute for Theoretical Physics, Univ of Geneva, Switz); Benjamin Wandel ( Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, Univ Pierre et Marie Curie, France); Roberto Trotta (Astrophysics Group, Dept of Physics, Imperial College London, UK); Phillip Gregory (Dept of Astronomy, Univ of British Columbia, Canada); Marc Henrion (Dept of Mathematics, Imperial College, London, UK); Asis Kumar Chattopadhyay (Dept of Statistics, Univ of Calcutta, India); Marisa March (Astrophysics Group, Dept of Physics, Imperial College, London, UK)./body

Studies of stellar formation in galaxies have a profound impact on our understanding of the present and the early universe. The book describes complex physical processes involved in the creation of stars and during their young lives. It illustrates how these processes reveal themselves from radio wavelengths to high energy X-rays and gamma -rays, with special reference towards high energy signatures. Several sections devoted to key analysis techniques demonstrate how modern research in this field is pursued.

Advances in Machine Learning Research and Application / 2012 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ eBook that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Machine Learning. The editors have built Advances in Machine Learning Research and Application / 2012 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Machine Learning in this eBook to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Advances in Machine Learning Research and Application / 2012 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.