Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 2010

When Blandford (Stanford U.) and the planning committee for this volume met in 2008, few would have predicted that a review on exoplanets beyond our solar system would appear in 2010. Several authors bring together different fields in a single review, e.g., those on interstellar dust in our Solar System, the birth environment of the Sun, solar and stellar flares, the universality of the stellar initial mass function, and chapters wedding the work of observers and modelers. Other reviews treat calibrations basic to all of astronomy, e.g., the distance scale through the Hubble constant, and the ages of stars. Dedicated to the late Geoffrey Burbridge, who laid many of the foundations of modern cosmology and this series, the volume includes the cumulative author and title indices for volumes 37-48. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)