Exoplanets, Edited by Sara Seager; University of Arizona Press; Tucson, Arizona; $35.00 (Cloth); 2011.
The editor of this volume, Sara Seager, is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Planetary Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a foremost authority on planets orbiting stars other than our star, the Sun.
Seager has brought together a tiger team of 34 collaborating authors, skillfully assisted by the Lunar Planetary Institute’s Renée Dotson.
This book is one of the publisher’s Space Science Series. As such, the book is rich with very detailed and authoritative looks at exoplanets. This volume serves as a seminal look at the field – one that stands ready and is enabled – for the first time in history – to answer a key question: “Are there other planets like Earth out there?”
There’s an exceptional introduction to exoplanets, along with sections on observing techniques for exoplanets; the dynamics of exoplanets, as well as how they form and evolve, concluding with papers on exoplanet interiors and atmospheres.
“This is a unique time in human history,” Seager writes in her kickoff preface to the book. For exoplanets, “anything is possible within the laws of physics and chemistry,” she adds, and “the best is yet to come.”
Given the rampage of discovery involving new worlds, you’ll find this book an important read – a valuable reference to better appreciate the upsurge in excitement regarding the existence of planets around other stars.
For example, NASA’s Kepler has already been hugely successful in its campaign to hunt for exoplanets. The reader will find this book to be a unique source book.
This University of Arizona Press book was done in collaboration with the Lunar and Planetary Institute. A majority of the papers in this volume are technical in nature, but an adroit reader will find priceless comments on where the search for exoplanets is now….and where it is headed.
One early nugget caught my eye just a few pages in – which sets the stage for the pages to follow: “Dedicated to all the people on this planet who have big dreams and succeed in making them happen.”
Exoplanets delivers on that score, and a reader will be all the wiser by reveling in the anticipation of the discoveries yet to come.
For more information on this book, go to:
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid2263.htm
By Leonard David