Modern Cosmological Observations and Problems

Abstract

This book describes modern cosmology in a novel way compared with most other textbooks. It is framed around observational results rather than the more common approach of being based on theory with occasional support from observations. This makes the book much more suitable for observational cosmologists and fills a gap in the market. Theory has not been neglected, however, and brief mathematical descriptions are given where relevant, using a simple approach and avoiding tensor algebra. This approach makes the book very suitable for final-year undergraduates and beginning postgraduates. The information content is high and up to date. This, together with the extensive reference lists, makes the book an excellent resource for undergraduate essays and for background material for budding cosmologists. After an introduction to the ideas of general relativity and basic cosmology, the author discusses the observations relevant to the thorny problem of the extragalactic distance scale at a thorough level. He goes on to describe the recent observations of voids in the distribution of galaxies, which naturally leads on to the dark matter problem and inflationary cosmologies. How the observed structures may have formed is discussed in the following chapter, and this is the most theoretically based chapter in the book. The final chapter discusses the extragalactic background in a wide variety of wavelength regions and explains how this tells us about the distribution of matter in the Universe. This is an excellent book which I can strongly recommend for university courses on cosmology as well as being a useful addition to an astronomer's library. It is well written and clear; the author has done a good job.