Mercury: The View after MESSENGER

  • Sean C. Solomon,
  • Larry R. Nittler &
  • Brian J. Anderson
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS: 2018. 596PP. £42.99

Despite its unique properties, Mercury is one of the least-explored planets in our Solar System. It is the closest planet to the Sun and its chemical composition remains a mystery with the potential of informing our understanding of how the Solar System formed. This timely tome presents an overview of what we know today about Mercury, from its core to its exosphere, magnetic fields, formation and evolution. The last chapter offers an outlook and motivation for the future of Mercury exploration. With the next in situ observations of Mercury expected a decade from now, this textbook aims to be the authoritative reference for the field until then.

A Student’s Guide to General Relativity

  • Norman Gray
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS: 2019. 162PP. £49.99

A cornerstone of modern physics, Einstein’s theory of general relativity is now part of most university physics curricula. Nonetheless, properly understanding this completely new framework of gravity, especially for students with little prior experience in the field, continues to be a challenge. In this book, Norman Gray aims to tackle this challenge by offering a compact guide for both undergraduate and graduate students to supplement other comprehensive textbooks on the topic. The author presents numerous worked examples and exercises, while also working through a few key applications of general relativity (such as gravitational waves and Mercury’s perihelion).

Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide

  • Jo Dunkley
PELICAN BOOKS: 2019. 320PP. £20.00

Jo Dunkley’s book title, if nothing else, is very ambitious. Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide aims to give an overview of the Universe as astronomers understand it today. The book’s colloquial prose targets a lay audience without prior scientific knowledge. Interestingly, the author takes space (rather than time) as her narrative axis. She first lays out the spatial scale, starting from planets to galaxies and beyond. She then tackles visible and invisible matter (the former mostly dealing with stellar astronomy and the latter with dark matter). The final two chapters of the book deal with the shape of the Universe and our current cosmological understanding of how our Universe came to be.