Lighthouses of the Universe: The Most Luminous Celestial Objects and Their Use for Cosmology

The book reviews the present status of understanding the nature of the most luminous objects in the Universe, connected with supermassive black holes and supermassive stars, clusters of galaxies and ultraluminous galaxies, sources of gamma-ray bursts and relativistic jets. Leading experts give overviews of essential physical mechanisms involved, discuss formation and evolution of these objects as well as prospects for their use in cosmology, as probes of the intergalactic medium at high redshifts and as a tool to study the end of dark ages. The theoretical models are complemented by new exciting results from orbital and ground-based observatories such as Chandra, XMM-Newton, HST, SDSS, VLT, Keck, and many others.

Inhalt
From the Contents: Clusters of Galaxies.- Brightest Galaxies.- Gamma-ray Bursts as the Lighthouses.- Gravitational Lensing and Gravitational Waves.- QSO, AGN, Blazars - Observational Data.- First Bright Objects and Their Role in the End of Dark Ages.- Formation and Growth of Supermassive BH.- Activity Connected with the Presence of Supermassive Black Holes.- Ultra-luminous X-ray Sources and Stellar Mass Black Holes.- QSO, AGN, Blazars as Probes of the Universe.- Lighthouses and the Cosmic Background Radiation.