电子书百科大全
The Blue Straggler Mystery
Author(s): Martin Beech (Author)
- Publisher: WSPC
- Publication Date: October 23, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 296 pages
- ISBN-10: 9819820081
- ISBN-13: 9789819820085
Book Description
Blue stragglers are celestial misfits. They stand out from the crowd, and they require special explanation. Remarkably, for so the observations indicate, they have aged differently to similar mass 'normal' stars. First recognized as being altogether different in the early 1950s, blue stragglers have occupied the thoughts of astronomers ever since. This book looks into the mystery of blue straggler origins, and offers its readers an insight in to how astronomers measure and determine the properties of stars in general. Indeed, the book will take the reader through the basic physics and geometry that is needed to understand the essential observations and theory of stars and star clusters. This book provides a review of the blue straggler phenomenon. This book provides an introduction to the basic methods by which astronomers have learned to know and understand the stars. This book provides a non-technical overview of how stars of different initial masses change as they age. This book examines how astronomers have unraveled the blue straggler mystery, invoking within its solution the need for violent collisions between stars, or the merger and consumption of one star by another within a close binary system.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"...written in a relaxed narrative style... I found the book to be an engaging and pleasant enough read..."
The Observatory Magazine
About the Author
Martin Beech is professor emeritus at Campion College, and the Department of Physics at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada. He has written numerous research papers on topics including solar system bodies, meteor astronomy, stellar structure and evolution, as well as on the history of science. Asteroid 12343 was named for his work relating to meteor physics, and he was awarded the Neumann Prize of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, for his book Going Underground: The Science and History of Falling through the Earth (World Scientific, 2019). Other titles published by World Scientific are, A Cabinet of Curiosities: The Myth, Magic and Measure of Meteorites (2021) and, Mind the Gap: The Labyrinthine Story of Planetary Orbits, Mathematics, and the Titius-Bode Rule (2024).