Amazon.com description: Product Description: Jay Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko combine extensive research experience (including years of research in such areas as radio astronomy, solar eclipses, supernovae, active galaxies, black holes, and cosmology), teaching experience, and textbook-writing experience to offer a book that is unparalleled in its ability to present the latest science in a way that students can understand. This brief and beautifully illustrated text - one of the briefest available for the course - offers concise coverage of a wide range of astronomical topics. An early discussion of the scientific method stresses its importance in the verification of observations. The authors emphasize the study of origins in this text, first by singling out specifics in the headings of each chapter and then by dealing with a variety of relevant material in the text itself. This new edition includes a new chapter on the dozens of exoplanets that are being discovered around other stars. Automatically packaged with TheSky™ CD-ROM and four months' free access to InfoTrac College Edition, the new edition extends student learning opportunities beyond the walls of the classroom.