[Physics] Recommend good book(s) about the “scientific method” as it relates to astronothe/astrophysics

Question

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I am interested in astronomy/astrophysics, but I am not science major (I am a computer science graduate). Facts and results of the field are presented to the public without showing how these facts/results got known or inferred. And I have that curiosity to know how we know what we know about the universe (either observationally or mathematically).

So my question is, what book(s) do you recommend for someone who has knowledge of

• algebra, trigonometry and geometry
• college-level calculus
• classical mechanics

and does not get intimidated by mathematical language?

I expect the book(s) to answer questions like (not necessarily all of the questions, but questions of the same level and kind as these):

• How do we know how distant from the earth a celestial body (for example, a star) is?
• How do we know the volume/mass of celestial bodies?
• How do we know the materials that a planet is made of?
• How do we know that our solar system orbits around the center of the galaxy?
• How do we calculate the total mass of the galaxy?

Answer 1

Astrophysics is a big field. There are a variety of resources that you can use if you'd like to learn about how we know what we know. Most good textbooks will teach you this. In fact, I've even read a standard community-college level astronomy book (which contained basically no mathematics at all) that conceptually explained how we can infer certain things - the mass of stars in a binary system, the distance to objects using parallax, etc.

One textbook that I've heard many great things about is Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, by Carroll & Ostlie. It is a fairly large book, containing not only concepts but the mathematical techniques used to discover them.

If you want to learn about a highly specialized technique or discovery, oftentimes you can read the scientific journal article that published the finding. There are many online resources. A very good one is arXiv. For example, if you wanted to look into the discovery that Vega is a fast-rotating star, you might read this article that describes it.