pt. I. Stars and clusters -- 1. Our cosmic backyard -- The big questions -- Stars : beacons and building blocks -- A 14-billion-year-old expanding universe -- 2. Looking up at the night sky -- The golden age of astronomy -- Telescopes -- Opening the spectrum -- Space -- Instruments and computers -- 3. The dark clouds of the Milky Way -- Dark clouds and the structure of our Milky Way galaxy -- Molecular clouds -- Cores, dust, and chemistry -- Dark clouds : cradles of stars -- 4. Infant stars -- The cold universe : far-infrared and sub-millimeter observations -- The search for new born stars -- Protostars and spinning disks -- Observations of protostars -- The initial mass function -- Energy sources of protostars -- 5. Companions in birth : binary stars -- Binary stars -- Young binaries and multiples -- The birth of binaries -- Disintegration of multiple stellar systems -- Competition in small stellar systems -- 6. Outflows from young stars -- The objects of Herbig and Haro -- Jets from newborn stars -- Churning dark clouds -- Properties of outflows -- The ins and outs of young stars -- 7. Towards adulthood -- Properties of young stars -- Circumstellar disks -- Eruptions -- Farewell to disks -- Adolescence : spots, flares, and X-rays -- Herbig Ae/Be stars -- 8. The social life of stars : stellar groups -- Associations : a loose brotherhood of stars -- Into the void -- The birth of clusters : ties that bind -- Super star clusters and globular clusters -- The life and death of a cluster -- 9. Chaos in the nest : the brief lives of massive stars -- Massive stars : live fast, die young -- Hot bubbles, silverlined clouds and elephant trunks -- An overview of the Orion region -- When star death triggers star birth -- A history of star birth in Orion -- Orion blows a bubble -- The ejected runaway stars -- Giant star-forming regions --
pt. II. Planetary systems -- 10. Solar systems in the making -- Knowing our own backyard : the Solar System -- Ice, dust, rocks, and planetesimals -- The birth of planets -- Moons and rings everywhere -- Pluto and the Kuiper Belt -- Pristine material : comets and the Oort Cloud -- The zodiacal light and debris disks around other stars -- 11. Messengers from the past -- Finding meteorites in cold and hot deserts -- Types of meteorites -- Meteorites as interplanetary flotsam -- Parent bodies and left-over planetesimals -- Bull's-eyes and near misses -- 12. Hazards to planet formation -- Young stars and disks in Orion -- Evaporating disks -- Clusters and collisions -- Supernovae and disks -- Can planetary systems form in proplyds? -- Towards a variety of planetary systems -- 13. Planets around other stars -- The quest for other worlds -- Giant planets and wobbling stars -- Planets in silhouette -- Gravity's lens -- The odd pulsar planets -- Extra-solar gas giants and their host stars -- Future telescopes in space and the quest for exo-planets --
pt. III. The cosmic context
Evolution and death of low- to intermediate-mass stars
Evolution and death of massive stars
Supernova remnants, superbubbles, massive shells, and giant rings
Formation of molecular clouds : a new beginning
The Gould's Belt : a fossil record of formation
From the ashes of the old : new clouds, new stars
15. Star formation in galaxies
Giant islands in the sky : the galaxies
Star formation in spiral galaxies
The center of our Milky Way
Colliding galaxies : star formation in the extreme
Nuclear starbursts : the power of giant black holes
Extragalactic jets : analogs of protostellar jets?
16. The first stars and galaxies
The cosmic microwave background
The formation and evolution of galaxies
17. Astrobiology, origins, and SETI
Astrobiology and the origins of life
