Interstellar and Intergalactic Medium

This concise textbook, the first volume in the Ohio State Astrophysics Series, covers all aspects of the interstellar and intergalactic medium for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. This series aims to impart the essential knowledge on a topic that every astrophysics graduate student should know, without going into encyclopedic depth. This text includes a full discussion of the circumgalactic medium, which bridges the space between the interstellar and intergalactic gas, and the hot intracluster gas that fills clusters of galaxies. Its breadth of coverage is innovative, as most current textbooks treat the interstellar medium in isolation. The authors emphasise an order-of-magnitude understanding of the physical processes that heat and cool the low-density gas in the universe, as well as the processes of ionization, recombination, and molecule formation. Problems at the end of each chapter are supplemented by online projects, data sets and other resources.

Barbara Ryden received her Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University. After postdocs at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, she joined the astronomy faculty at The Ohio State University, where she is now a full professor. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in teaching, at levels ranging from introductory undergraduate courses to advanced graduate seminars. She won the Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award for her textbook Introduction to Cosmology (Cambridge, 2016). She is co-author, with Bradley M. Peterson, of one of the market leading astrophysics texts, Foundations of Astrophysics (Cambridge, 2020).

Richard W. Pogge received his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of California Santa Cruz. Following postdocs at the University of Texas at Austin and The Ohio State University, he joined the astronomy faculty at OSU where he is a full professor and vice-chair for instrumentation. His research includes observational spectrophotometry of astrophysics of gaseous nebulae from interstellar gas to active galactic nuclei using ground- and space-based observatories from radio to X-ray. He has over forty years of experience teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses.