Jürgen Schaffner-Bielich is a professor in theoretical astrophysics at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main. Since completing his Ph.D., he has worked at the Niels Bohr Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, the RIKEN BNL Research Center at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University,New York, and as a professor at the University of Heidelberg.
'The study of compact stars has been enjoying a renaissance after the gravitational wave detection of a binary neutron star merger and high-quality X-ray data from instruments like NICER that constrain their properties. Schaffner-Bielich's textbook on compact stars is a timely addition to the literature that offers a primer on compact stars, including white dwarfs, pulsars, neutron stars, quark stars and hybrid stars. The author discusses in depth the theory underpinning our understanding of these objects (general relativity and the thermodynamics of dense matter) but also presents updated constraints on their properties from observations, including gravitational waves.' Dr. Marios Karouzos, Nature Astronomy 'Compact Star Physics is a sophisticated monograph devoted to the study of the end points of stellar evolution. ... the text Schaffner-Bielich ... employs mathematical tools and expressions that are beyond what will be accessible to most undergraduates. This a very good and indeed up-to-date text devoted to an important part of astrophysics that should be found in college libraries.' K. L. Schick, Choice