Table of Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTION AND TECHNICAL NOTES

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNIVERSE
The Big Bang
Cosmic Evolution: Dark Matter;
The First Stars
Cosmo-Chronometry

THE EVOLUTION OF STARS
Formation, Classification, and Evolution of Stars
Chemistry in AGB Stars
Galaxies and Clusters

THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM
General
Chemistry in Interstellar Clouds

THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Overview
Earth's Moon and the Terrestrial Planets: Mercury, Venus, and Mars
Ceres, Asteroids, Meteorites, and Interplanetary Dust
Comets
Kuiper Belt Objects
The Giant Planets and Their Moons

EXOPLANETS

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
What is Life?
Putative Non-Carbon and Non-Aqueous Life Forms;
The Biological Role of Silicate, Phosphate, and Water
Life Under Extreme Conditions
Scenarios for the Primordial Supply of Basic Life Molecules
Extraterrestrial Life?

About the Author

Dieter Rehder is a Chemistry Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He obtained his academic degrees in Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Hamburg, and was appointed Professor in Hamburg after two-and-a-half years of teaching appointments at The College of Arts Science and Technology in Kingston, Jamaica. He has authored about 280 publications, and received the Vanadis Award for outstanding research in vanadium chemistry in 2006. His main teaching obligations encompass Organometallic Chemistry, NMR Spectroscopy (metal neclei), and Bioinorganic Chemistry. In 2008/09, he was guest lecturer at the University of Lund (Sweden).

Reviews

"It is a story of immense timescales and distances, coupled to the atomic and molecular processes at low temperaturs and densities that are controlled microscopically by the laws of quantum mechanics." (Chemistry World, 1 February 2011)