Welcome to the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf

This is a collection of open-licensed, freely available texts on various topics in astrophysics. You are free to use them as-is, make mash-ups of different texts, or contribute back to their development.

Texts are written in LaTeX and managed as a github repository under the Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf github organization. Each text has a lead author who manages the contributions. Anyone else can contribute by forking a text's project repo, making modifications, and then issuing a pull-request through the github website.

Any type of contribution is welcomed—typos, clarifications, new chapters, etc. All contributors will be acknowledged in the text, for instance, by having a hierarchical author list giving the lead author(s), major contributing authors, and then authors who make minor corrections/clarifications. Each text can devise their own system that works best for them. (And of course the git history will list all contributions.)

All the books in the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf are living— they continually evolve. But since it is all managed by git, the entire history of the text is freely available to anyone. A git hash can be used to reference a particular instance of the text.

Current Texts

Introduction to Computational Astrophysical Hydrodynamics

github repo PDF version

An introduction to the grid-based methods commonly used for astrophysical simulation, starting with linear advection and developing the methods for the compressible Euler equations, multigrid, diffusion, multiphysics problems, incompressible flow, and low Mach number flows.

Links to simple python scripts implementing the basic ideas are embedded in the text, and all the methods described here are implemented in two-dimensional in the companion pyro code.

Get the text's source:

$ git clone https://github.com/Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf/numerical_exercises.git

Star Formation

github repo PDF version

This text is a series of lecture notes on star formation, based on Mark Krumholz's course on the topic at UC Santa Cruz.

Get the text's source:

$ git clone https://github.com/Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf/star_formation_notes.git

Astrophysical Processes

github repo PDF version

These notes were written by Jeremy Heyl and cover radiative processes and fluids..

Get the text's source:

$ git clone https://github.com/Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf/astrophysical_processes_notes

Stellar Physics

github repo PDF version

This text is a series of lecture notes on star formation, based on Mark Krumholz's course on the topic at UC Santa Cruz.

Get the text's source:

$ git clone https://github.com/Open-Astrophysics-Bookshelf/stellar-physics-notes.git

Become an Author!

If you'd like your book hosted on this project page, create a github issue for this website giving the text's title, summary, and (proposed) table on contents. We'll create a new project repo for your text in the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf organization, with you as the owner.

Discuss!

Subscript to the mailing list: open-astro-books@googlegroups.com to discuss ideas for texts.