High-Energy Astrophysics (Princeton Series in Astrophysics)

Arrived on time and as expected.

"A teaspoon full of matter from a Neutron star weighs more than all of humanity combined and dropping a marshmallow onto the surface of a neutron star releases energy equivalent to a medium sized atomic bomb." This is the world of high energy astrophysics. I actually read that snippet from this book while in the bookstore and boy did it really catch my interest. I am not an Astrophysicist or an Astronomer. In fact I am not even a scientist. I am an architectural photographer who just happens to be a space junkie. I am an amateur backyard astronomer and do a lot of astrophotoghraphy, the sun being my favorite subject. With that being said I do a lot of astronomy/physics reading, both online and offline. I personally find the subjects involved in high energy astrophysics to be the most interesting. Black holes, Neutron Stars, White Dwarfs, SuperNova remnants, Magnetars etc.. They just fascinate me like very few things can. This book gives an outstanding overview to the field of high energy astrophysics but be forewarned, this is not an easy read as its intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. High energy astrophysics involves the study of phenomena occurring near the most extreme celestial objects known to exist. Again this includes such objects as Black Holes, SuperNova remnants, White Dwarfs, Magnetars, Pulsars, galaxy clusters, gamma-ray burts etc.. This book covers all the bases including observational methods, experimental techniques, and the instrumentation used to study these objects. I personally found the information on instrumentation to be extremely fascinating and very well written. Even tho there were parts of this book that were clearly over my "level", I still found this book to be an amazing read and overall I learned a lot about this field, the subject matter, and techniques used to study such phenomena. Its easily one of the best astronomy books I have read yet. If your interested in such subject matter and have a good background in astronomy, physics, and mathematics then this book should definitely be on your bookshelf. 5 stars!!

I have now read through this book twice and I must say, it is one of the best and most complete overviews of high-energy astrophysics I have ever seen. Topics are mathematically covered ad nauseam, though any nausea I experienced was more from my brain spinning with the concepts (and in quite a good way). I think Dr. Melia has written THE text on HE Astrophysics. That said, I do offer a word of warning to those who would attempt this Everest (and to read it truly is an Everest expedition for the mind - challenging, demanding proper preparation, and most certainly not for any but the most serious of students or scholars): this book was written for advanced graduate-level programs and, as such, it assumes a significant degree of knowledge on the part of the reader. If you are not fluent in the language of higher-order mathematics, do not understand at least the basics of high-energy physics, or lack a significant interest in this subject, you will find this text grueling and will likely regret your purchase decision (I had several friends borrow this to see if they would enjoy it - intelligent friends, mind you - and all but one of them became frustrated and lost within three pages). However, if these qualifications do not scare you away, I think you will find this book as wonderfully enlightening as I did and you will most certainly learn a great deal about the universe and the mechanics of the cosmos.

There is something for everyone in this book. People interested in observational techniques and data will appreciate the overview in the first few chapters. Those more interested in the theoretical interpretation of high-energy sources will find ample discussion of the physical principles underlying these objects in the rest of the book. But don't expect to see the most complete discussion of this subject here. This book is intended more as a compact overview of the central topics, and in this regard, it works quite well. I found the list of references particularly helpful. Anyone interested in learning more about any particular sub-topic will find the references up-to-date and very relevant. Overall, this will make a great addition to your library.

I agree with Dennis Evans review completely but I cannot give this book more than 3. There is a lot of "back-of-the-envelop" type of estimation and hand-waving arguments which I found to be hard to follow, I could not grasp the main theoretical arguments from formulas of the author. The author, in my opinion, is wasting too many pages on recapitulating standard topics of graduate curriculum and fails to connect them to the main developments of the chapter, quickly referring one to this or that author for the details. I did not need the derivation of the dipole radiation, or be told that it is convenient to introduce potentials into Maxwell's equations. Perhaps the observational material could be of interest to some people, if they were not written in such a verbose manner. This book is only useful for special lists and the experts, you will not learn how to build a physical model from a combination of first principles and empirical observations and then compare them with observation. In fact, obtaining the analytical or numerical details of such analysis is very difficult: undergraduate texts do not cover them, graduate texts, such as these, refer to original papers, and those papers often omit the details. Where can one find the details of the numerical simulation of an accretion disk around a neutral star? How can one verify the correctness of the preferred solution or build on it? There is no way currently of doing so. You just have assertions by the writers of such books.