Nobel Prizes in Astronomy

Written in an accessible style, this unique book aims at describing the Nobel prize winning works in astronomy to readers who only have a background of high school physics. It gives a glimpse of the work done by those prize-winning astronomers at the forefront of research and the state-of-the-art techniques used for that, to an interested reader.

There have been 11 years when Nobel prizes in physics have been given to astronomers. These award-winning works cover almost the entire subject of astronomy, starting from stellar structure all the way to cosmology. The prizes have been divided in 7 categories which are described in 7 chapters. For each prize a brief biography of the winner(s) is given first. The subject of the award is put into context and the reader is reminded of all the basic concepts needed for understanding the work before, finally, the prize-winning work is described.

This enjoyable book will give the interested reader an excellent overview of the highlights and development of astronomy of the 20^th and early 21^st century.

Introduction.- Stellar Structure.- Stellar Evolution.- Radio and X-ray Astronomy.- Extrasolar Planets.- Black Holes.- Gravitational Waves.- Cosmology. 

Pushpa Khare is an astrophysicist and has worked as a faculty member at the department of physics, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. She has visited several universities in the world for research and teaching. She published more than 50 research papers in the best journals in the subject and has guided two students for their Ph.D. She has been an associate of IUCAA since its inception and after retirement from Utkal University, spent 4 years at IUCAA as CSIR emeritus fellow.

She has always been greatly interested in popularisation of astronomy and has written a number of articles in popular science magazines. She has also given a very large number of talks with extensive questions and answer sessions in schools and colleges.

After retiring from active research in 2014, she has translated three books written by Prof. J. V. Narlikar on popular astronomy. In 2018, she coauthored a book on gravitational waves in Marathi which was published by Rajhans publications. It won the Jyotiba Phule award for science writing in Marathi, given by the Maharashtra state. The revised and updated English version of this book was published by Springer in 2020. She has been a member of the committee which rewrote the physics textbooks of 7th to 12th standard of Maharashtra state board.