Observational Cosmology , Stephen SerjeantCambridge U. Press, New York, 2010. $60.00 (324 pp.). ISBN 978-0-521-15715-5
It’s an exciting time to study our weird universe. In the past decade, rapid progress in observational cosmology has yielded rich and bizarre findings. For example, we now know that less than 5% of the universe’s energy density is in normal baryonic matter. The other main components—dark matter and dark energy—contain enough energy density to render the universe spatially flat and are mysterious beyond their basic properties. The field’s next decade will be dedicated to probing how dark matter and energy influence the expansion of the universe and control the assembly of structure.
Observational Cosmology provides upper-level undergraduate students a wide-ranging and compact introduction to the field. Its author, Stephen Serjeant, is a reader in cosmology at the Open University, a distance-learning institution based in the UK. He studies active and star-forming galaxies,...
