Synopsis
The NATO Advanced Study Institute "Cosmological Aspects of X-Ray Clus- ters of Galaxies" took place in Vel en, Westphalia, Germany, from June 6 to June 18, 1993. It addressed the fruitful union of two topics, cosmology and X-ray clus- ters, both of which carry substantial scientific weight at the beginning of the last decenium of the last century in the second millenium of our era. The so far largest X-ray "All-Sky Survey", observed by the ROSAT X-ray satel- lite, and ROSAT's deep pointed observations, have considerably enlarged the base of X-ray astronomy, particularly concerning extragalactic sources. Cosmology has gained significant impetus from the large optical direct and spectroscopic surveys, based on high quality 2-dimensional receivers at large telescopes and powerful scan- ning devices, harvesting the full information 1 content from the older technique of employing photographic plates. Radioastronomy and IR-astronomy with IRAS, as well as r-astronomy with GRO, continue and strengthen the role of extragalactic research. The rapidly growing computer power in data reduction and data storage facilities support the evolution towards large-number statistics. A most significant push was given to early cosmology by the needs of physics in trying to unravel the nature of forces which govern our material world. The topic of the ASI was chosen because it opens new vistas on this for ever new problem: the universe. Clusters of galaxies probe large-scale matter distributions and the structure of space-time.
Présentation de l'éditeur
The presentations of this Nato Advanced Study Institute center around X-ray clusters of galaxies and their role in understanding the structure and evolution of the universe. Reminiscences of the beginning of the extra-solar X-ray astronomy some 30 years ago, of subsequent X-ray satellites which, among other discoveries, found galaxy clusters to be an important new class of intrinsically bright X-ray sources, and highlights from the most recent All Sky Survey by Rosat serve as an introduction. The topics range from X-ray clusters and cluster environments to cluster masses and dynamics, cooling flows and chemical abundances, cluster lensing and the Sunyaev--Sel'dovich effect, cluster formation and evolution to large scale structure in the universe and cosmological parameters. The reviews, introducing the various topics, generally conclude with presentations of current and future work and are frequently followed by shorter research notes pertaining to ongoing projects. More than 200 figures illustrate the discussions, more than 20 tables and many quotations in the text provide numerical data for almost 100 clusters of galaxies and give new estimates for the cosmological parameters. Together with a good sample of equations, they constitute a useful collection of empirical and theoretical quantities and relations in extragalactic X-ray astronomy and cosmology.
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