Serious semi-popular book on Milky Way - a long awaited event

[madbadgalaxyman]

Many of you will know that there has been little written in the way of detailed (not oversimplified) but accessible overviews of the Milky Way Galaxy suitable for mid-level amateur astronomers and for science-oriented members of the public, since Bok and Bok wrote "The Milky Way"(5th edition) some decades ago.

William H. Waller, a respected researcher in the fields of Milky Way Structure and Stellar Evolution and the Interstellar Medium, who (unusually!) also has another simultaneous career as a science educator, has finally taken the bull by the horns and attempted a sober and detailed, but accessible and reasonably easy-to-read, book about our own Galaxy.

The book is:
"The Milky Way : An Insider's Guide"
published this year by Princeton University Press

The ISBN is: 0691122245

Dr Waller has an unusual Curriculum Vitae, which proves that the old dictum "He who can does, and he who cannot..... teaches" is a lie, because Waller does research and teaches at high school!

[madbadgalaxyman]

Here's some of my previous posts, giving further resources about our very own Milky Way Galaxy.....

Here is a recent review paper, by Professor Kenneth C. Freeman of ANU, about the structure and evolution of our own Galaxy:

148257

Bok and Bok, "The Milky Way"(5th edition); the original and best detailed non-technical exposition of the Milky Way.


The recent well-illustrated & well written semi-popular level (enthusiast-level) textbook “Shrouds of the Night : Masks of The Milky Way (…..)” by Block and Freeman, published 2008, (ISBN: 9780387789743) …....is at least an up-to-date source of information on galaxies for the scientifically oriented layperson, and it does contain substantial material about the Milky Way.

Also, “Galaxies and The Cosmic Frontier”, by Waller and Hodge, published 2003, (ISBN: 0674 010795 )
was a hurried attempt at a textbook on galaxies at the “amateur astronomer” readership level, and it contained a chapter on the Milky Way. Not particularly well written or well structured, but worth a look.

A fairly recent university textbook about galaxies which contains three chapters of accurate and detailed explanations about the Milky Way, is “Galaxies in The Universe : An Introduction” by Linda S. Sparke and John S. Gallagher. This book is now into its second edition, and it is a model of clear writing and logical structure. Please note that this book is at the undergraduate to graduate level - so it is probably too hard for all but the very advanced amateur with a strong physical orientation.

The great scarcity of published overviews about our Galaxy surely reflects the over-specialization within astronomy, with many separate books or symposia being published on topics such as star-formation, galaxy bulges, galaxy disks, the Magellanic Clouds, galactic dynamics, the interstellar medium, stellar evolution, etc., all of which are important pieces of the giant puzzle that is our own Galaxy. It also reflects the fact that it is nearly impossible for today's professional astronomers to find “writing time” away from their narrowly-focused & highly competitive research activities.

External galaxies have been my primary study for a long time, but lately I have started to revert back to my old guise of being a night watchman of the Milky Way Galaxy, so here is a list of (rather high level) resources regarding our own Galaxy:

Individual chapters about the Milky Way that are found within textbooks about Galaxies;
I won't review these here, but I note that I have reviewed many of the textbooks about galaxies at the amazon.com website (NOT amazon in the U.K.). Just google-search on the search terms “madbioman”(which is my amazon username) and “profile”, in order to find all of my book reviews under the name “R.A.Lang”. As a general rule, a chapter about the Milky Way in a general astronomy textbook will tend to be somewhat inaccurate, definitely oversimplified, and very often out-of-date. Much better are the chapters about the Milky Way Galaxy written in textbooks specifically about galaxies.

"The Galaxy Disk in Cosmological Context" , IAU Symposium No. 254 (year 2008)
You can buy this in a paper volume (for a King's Ransom....), or you can get many of the write-ups of the presentations on the internet – for free!!. There are perhaps a dozen review papers here that are relevant to our own Galaxy, presenting modern treatments of: stellar populations in our Galaxy, chemical evolution and abundance gradients, new evidence for substantial ongoing accretion of gas by our Galaxy, star-formation triggering in spiral arms, molecular and atomic hydrogen in galaxies, mass & luminosity functions of open clusters, the nature and formation of our Galaxy's bulge, the disk of our Galaxy, etc.
You may be able to use google to find this reference by searching for “IAU Symposia”, or alternatively;
go to http://journals.cambridge.org (http://journals.cambridge.org/) , then browse the journal titles to find “Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union”, then click on “Back Issues”, then find the back issues for the year 2008, and then find “Symposium S254”.

“ The Evolving ISM in the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies ”(2007 conference)
This is a collection of short reviews about various topics relating to the Interstellar Medium. You can download these papers, free of charge. A quick way to find these write-ups of the conference presentations is just to do a google search on the title of this conference. This is probably not the most useful conference proceedings about the ISM, but it is quite recent, and it is the only one I can think of at present!

“ KITP Conference : Back to the Galaxy II ” (conference held in 2008)
This conference had a large number of Very Good presentations on a wide variety of topics relating to our own Galaxy. There is lots of free information available at the conference website:
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/milkyway_c08

“ The Galactic Plane Reloaded ” (EWASS 2012 – Symposium 4)(year 2012)
This conference, which will be held in July this year, will be on the subject of all of the new multi-wavelength surveys of the Milky Way. The conference presentations and their writeups should be essential reading for those interested in the broad-scale structure and properties of our own Galaxy. There have been few overviews published about the structure of our own galaxy, outside of individual scientific papers, for many years. So for those of us who are unfamiliar with the extensive and widely-scattered information sources about our Galaxy, this symposium could serve as a useful catchup and summary about what is known about the Milky Way.


Handbook of Star Forming Regions : Volume 1, The Northern Sky (Astronomical Society of The Pacific; Monograph), Ed. Bo Reipurth. (ISBN: 1583816704)
and:
Handbook of Star Forming Regions : Volume 2, The Southern Sky (Astronomical Society of The Pacific; Monograph), Ed. Bo Reipurth (ISBN: 1583816712)
These two unique and massive volumes, averaging about 1000 pages each, are graduate-level monographs that cover, in detail, most of the prominent star-forming regions in the Milky Way (well, at least those regions that are seen prominently from our position in the Milky Way!).
There are individual chapters devoted to each of the star-forming complexes, e.g. Eta Carinae, the Pipe Nebula, the Chameleon dark cloud, RCW108(=NGC 6188)(=Ara OB1), NGC 6334, NGC 6231 & Sco OB1, the Scorpius-Centaurus Complex of Bright Stars, the Lagoon Nebula, M16, Rho Ophiuchi, The Rosette, The Orion Nebula, NGC 2264, etc., etc., etc., etc.
The idea of these two books is to summarize, in detail, what today's professional astronomers know about each of these star-forming regions; the molecular gas & dark clouds from which new stars are forming, the onset of Star Formation due to gas compression and shock waves, the current formation of stars within the gas cloud, the stars which have already formed from the gas, and the emission nebulae which are energized by the hot young stars that have just formed.
These volumes really are a unique and massive and extremely useful compilation of data that would otherwise have to be acquired piecemeal by reading many thousands of scientific papers!!
This wonderful book brings together, into two volumes, just about everything that is known about the many nebular complexes in our Galaxy. The reader acquires an “insiders” view of these star-forming regions and of the interstellar medium, without having to track down and absorb vast quantities of widely-scattered data.
Question: Are these books for you?
Answer: If you can understand some of the simpler papers in the professional journals like the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical journal, then you can start to benefit from "Handbook of Star Forming Regions. You might manage to derive useful information from these volumes without having a very very strong astronomical background and/or a physics orientation, but then again you might not. There is quite a lot of descriptive and non-algebraic material in these volumes, but it is interspersed with many passages that are very dense with specialized jargon.....in particular, some of the recent infrared and submillimeter observations are in wavelength regimes that are so new that specialized scientific vocabularies have developed within the last few years!
Anyone aspiring to understand star formation needs to know about the infrared to mm-wave regime.....as these photons can pass through the dense and dusty star-forming clouds!

[lepton3]

Thanks for bringing this book to my attention. Looks interesting, I have ordered it.

-Ivan

[madbadgalaxyman]

Hi Ivan,

I have only seen the first two chapters of this book, and it looks promising. We don't have much choice in detailed books about the Milky Way, unless we go to the very high level literature.

cheers, Robert