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This is the first volume in the series ‘The Present Revolution in Astronomy’ authored by G Srinivasan.

The outstanding question in astronomy at the turn of the twentieth century was: what are the stars and why are they as they are? In this volume, the story of how the answer to this fundamental question was unravelled is narrated in an informal style, with emphasis on the underlying physics. It also gives an overview of the topics that will be covered in later volumes—white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, galaxies, and the universe at large.

I know of no comparable book in the present-day literature that so successfully conveys the excitement of the development of ideas pertaining to the physics of stars, including the newest discoveries, and at the same time explains the fundamentals so well.

E P J van den Heuvel
Professor of Astrophysics
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Listen to author's talk on Youtube

G Srnivasan began his career as a solid state physicist and later switched to astrophysics. After his PhD at the University of Chicago, he worked at the IBM Research Laboratory, Zurich, Switzerland; Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden; Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge; and Raman Research Institute, Bangalore. He is a Past President of the Astronomical Society of India, as well as the Division of Space and High Energy Astrophysics of the International Astronomical Union. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a former Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow.

Foreword
Preface

The Present Revolution in Astronomy: An Overview
Chapter 1   What Are the Stars?
Chapter 2   Stars as Globes of Gas
Chapter 3   Eddington’s Theory of the Stars
Chapter 4   Why Are the Stars as They Are?
Chapter 5   Energy Generation in the Stars
Chapter 6   Sounds of the Sun
Chapter 7   The Smoking Gun is Finally Found Epilogue