Modern astrophysics has revealed a Universe alive with explosions great and small. It is an astonishingly active place, far different from the serene “clockwork Universe” previously envisioned. Our tour of this dynamic Universe includes the active Sun, extrasolar planets and the search for intelligent life on them, the highly active relativistic plasma that is the residue of a stellar explosion in the year 1054 AD, dramatic x-ray fluctuations of a black-hole binary system, and the most powerful explosions of all — gamma ray bursts. We finish with some extensions of novel time series analysis methods to other problems: the arrow of time, the multi-scale structure of the Universe and DNA gene sequence analysis.
Jeff Scargle