Gabe Miller provides an overview of the mental health of sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations. Sexual and gender minority mental health is impacted by multiple levels of influence, including individual, interpersonal, community, and societal-level determinants. In addition to the historical and ongoing medicalization of sexual orientation and gender identity, SGM populations experience unique social stressors that impact their mental health. The high prevalence of mental health disorders observed in SGM populations are the result of higher levels of social stress and social stigma that SGM people experience across the life course, across multiple domains, and across multiple levels. Despite these substantial stressors, SGM people exhibit resilience, resistance, and joy. How might these unique SGM-related social stressors at different levels combine or intersect to impact the mental health of SGM people?

The sociological approach focuses on the factors external to the individual – the environmental or social context – and views mental illness as a breakdown in the face of overwhelming environmental stress. Thoits overviews three dominant theories, or models, and describes their basic assumptions, advantages and limitations, and implications for treating or preventing mental illness. Stress theory is based upon evidence that accumulations of social stressors can precipitate mental health problems. However, the relationship between stress exposure and psychiatric symptoms is not strong because individuals have extensive coping resources to help them handle stress. Researchers focus on the relationship between stress and coping mechanisms, and also on the unequal distribution of chronic strains and a variety of coping resources in the population. One reason that higher rates of mental disorder and psychological distress are found in lower status, disadvantaged groups is that these groups are more likely to be exposed to stressors and less likely to have important coping resources. In order to treat mental illness, one needs to eliminate or reduce stressors, teach the individual different coping resources, and bolster their personal resources. Structural strain theory locates the origins of disorder and distress in the broader organization of society. Mental illness may be an adaptive response to structural strain, or to one’s degree of integration into society. For example, during periods of high unemployment, admissions to treatment for psychosis increase, while periods of economic upturn are associated with lower rates of hospitalization. A structural condition, hard economic times, caused people to experience major stressors and provoked mental illness. Society’s organization places some groups at a social or economic disadvantage. In order to prevent or reduce mental illness, society must be restructured in a fairly major way; for example, creating a guaranteed minimum income to eliminate the strains of unemployment. A third approach to mental illness is labeling, or societal reaction, theory. The logic behind labeling theory is that people who are labeled as mentally ill, and who are treated as mentally ill, become mentally ill. Symptoms of mental illness are viewed as violations of the normative order whereby individuals break taken-for-granted rules about how one should think, feel, and behave. The way to reduce or prevent mental illness is to change those norms that define what is normal versus abnormal behavior. While this may seem idealistic, labeling theory has been very important in alerting us to the consequences of labeling and institutionalization. The reader should think about the various ways the three sociological approaches to mental illness complement each other, as well as how they contribute to the biological and psychological understandings of mental disorder.

Virginia Aldigé Hiday and Bradley Ray examine two prevailing beliefs about mental illness and the criminal justice system: that deinstitutionalization has led to the criminalization of mental illness and that persons with mental illness are dangerous and likely to commit crimes. The chapter reviews the available empirical evidence for these beliefs. Although arrest rates and incarceration rates are indeed higher for persons with mental illness than for the general population, criminalization may be an inaccurate characterization. Furthermore, most people with mental illnesses are not violent, and only a small proportion becomes violent. The chapter goes on to examine how persons with mental illness are handled by the criminal justice system. The authors suggest that there are five subgroups of persons with severe mental illness who come into contact with the criminal justice system: (1) those committing only misdemeanor nuisance offenses; (2) those committing offenses involving survival behaviors; (3) those who abuse alcohol and drugs, which lead to high rates of criminal offenses from the use of illegal substances, from attempts to support their habits, and from violence arising out of their use; (4) those with a character disorder who have high rates of felonious criminal offending, especially for violence against others; and (5) a much smaller subgroup whose members fit the stereotypical image of a severely disordered person driven to criminally violent actions by delusions. All five groups tend to live in impoverished, disorganized communities where it is difficult to survive with a major mental illness. The authors conclude that the criminal justice system is left to pick up the pieces after the failure of other social institutions. What types of social stressors contribute to the criminalization of the mentally ill? What failures of social institutions have led to incarceration of those with mental illnesses?

Hubble’s law gives us the simple and obvious interpretation that we currently live in an expanding universe. The inverse of Hubble’s constant defines the "Hubble time" which effectively marks the time in the past since the expansion began. more realistically, one would expect the universe expansion to be slowed by the persistent inward pull of gravity from its matter. We consider how various theoretical models for the universe connect with the observable redshift that indicates its expansion.

We have seen how a star’s color or peak wavelength indicates its characteristic temperature near the stellar surface. But what about the temperature in the star’s deep interior? Intuitively, we expect this to be much higher than at the surface, but under what conditions does it become hot enough to allow for nuclear fusion to power the star’s luminosity? And how does it scale quantitatively with the overall stellar properties, like mass, radius, and luminosity? To answer these questions, we identify two distinct considerations.

The post-main-sequence evolution of stars with higher initial mass (>8 solar masses) has some distinct differences from those of solar and intermediate-mass stars. We show how multiple-shell burning can lead to core-collapse supernovae, which are important in generating elements heavier than iron. Some supernovae can lead to the curious stellar end points of neutron stars and black holes.

Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars other than our sun. While some have now been detected (or confirmed) by direct imaging, most exoplanet detections have been made via two other more indirect techniques, known as the radial velocity and transit methods. These methods have analogs in the study of stellar binary systems, as outlined in Chapter 10. We explore the population of known exoplanets and how we must compensate for observational biases inherent in each of these techniques.

We start with some of the historical work on measuring distances to galaxies, leading to the Hubble (or Hubble-Lemaitre) law, a linear proportionality between recession velocity and and a galaxy’s distance, with a proportionality constant known as the Hubble constant. For more distant galaxies, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect and resolve even giant stars like Cepheid variables as individual objects, limiting their utility in testing the Hubble law to larger distances and redshifts. For much larger distances, an important alternative method is the Tully–Fisher relation.

To test which of these models applies to our universe, one needs to extend redshift measurements to large distances, out to several Giga-light years. The most successful approach has been to use white dwarf supernovae (SN type Ia) as very luminous standard candles. One of the greatest surprises of modern astronomy is that the expansion of the universe must be accelerating! This implies there must be a positive, repulsive force that pushes galaxies apart, in opposition to gravity. We dub this force "dark energy."

Earth’s moon is quite distinct from other moons in the solar system, in being a comparable size to Earth. We explore the theory that a giant impact in the chaotic early solar system led to the Moon’s formation, and bombardment by ice-laden asteroids provided the abundant water we find on our planet. Further we find that Earth’s magnetic field shields us from solar wind protons, that protect our atmosphere from being stripped away. The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn are the best targets for exploring if life exists elsewhere in the solar system.

This chapter characterizes the burden of suicidal behavior among adolescents using a sociological lens and a public health prevention approach. It describes the public health approach to preventing adolescent suicidal behavior. The public health approach includes assessing the problem; identifying causes or risk and protective factors; developing and evaluating programs; and implementing and disseminating findings. The chapter gives numbers on the extent of the problem among adolescents, describing the numbers, rates, and trends of fatal and nonfatal suicidal behavior among youth, then a summary of what is known about the community- and societal-level risk, and protective factors of the problem are presented, showing where sociology and public health complement each other. Lastly, the authors list several community- and societal-level prevention programs and the implications for what can be done to prevent adolescent suicidal behavior. Which types of suicidal behavior identified by Durkheim (i.e., anomic, egoistic, fatalistic, and altruistic) are addressed by modern prevention programs?

The close proximity of the Sun, and its extreme apparent brightness, makes it by far the most important star for lives here on Earth. In modern times we have access to powerful telescopes, both on the ground and in space, that observe and monitor the Sun over a wide range of wavelength bands. These vividly demonstrate that the Sun is in fact highly structured and variable over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.