In Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics by James Jeans, explore how our sun, planets, and stars may have formed and evolved.
The text surveys early ideas about how cosmic systems originate, stabilize, and reshaped themselves under gravity and motion.
Two concise sections frame the big questions: how rotating masses organize their shape, how matter streams and condenses, and how interactions between bodies can drive the birth of planets, moons, and stars. The discussion blends theoretical models with natural outcomes, offering a clear map of the challenges scientists have faced in explaining our cosmic neighborhood.
- Learn how jets of gas and condensing matter might form planets and satellites.
- See how Roche’s model and binary-star dynamics help explain stability and closer approaches.
- Understand the earth–moon system as a unique puzzle in planetary evolution.
- Get a sense of how star clusters and galactic structure arise from moving bodies and streams of material.
Ideal for readers of astronomy, cosmology, and the history of ideas in science, this edition helps you follow the logic from basic physics to large-scale cosmic structures.
Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics is a theoretical prelude to Jeans's later and more mature work on the subject, Astronomy and Cosmogony. The impetus for publishing his theories on the behaviour of rotating masses, and on general dynamical theory, was the 1917 Adams Prize on the 'rotating and gravitating fluid mass'.