Preface

Astrophysics is a highly important part of the modern vision of the world around us. Over the past century, it has transformed the very foundation and basic philosophical concepts on the fundamental laws of nature controlling the structure and evolution of the Universe. One can recall such fascinating astrophysical discoveries as the expansion of the Universe and more recently the accelerated expansion; dark matter and dark energy and so on. This is why astrophysics is studied in hundreds of universities throughout the world; astrophysical courses are taken by students with highly diverse backgrounds, often concentrating on disciplines lacking a direct connection to astrophysics. This textbook considers primarily those astrophysical and space plasma phenomena, in which electromagnetic interactions play a primary or at least essential role. This textbook has been written based on graduate and undergraduate courses and seminars on “cosmic electrodynamics,” “magnetohydrodynamics,” “plasma astrophysics,” and “radiative processes in astrophysics” that the authors have taught to many generations of students at State Polytechnic University (St. Petersburg, Russia) and New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, New Jersey, USA), cumulatively, over more than half a century, in conjunction with the authors’ astrophysical studies in the field of theoretical astrophysics, including plasma astrophysics, cosmic rays, solar wind, solar flares, supernova remnants, performed mainly at the above universities, Ioffe Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia), and National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA). Jointly, we have a long history of teaching these sciences in Russia and the USA, and at some point we felt more and more strongly a deficit of appropriate textbooks to teach our students, which led us to substitute journal papers for use in teaching. We know that many of our colleagues teaching these courses experience similar feelings, so we decided to convert our research and teaching experience to a modern, concise textbook on cosmic electrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. A driver of the textbook writing was, therefore, our willingness to share our teaching experience with our peers and supply them with a textbook representing a core, self-contained reading source, much needed to facilitate delivering undergraduate and graduate courses to students concentrating in