Chaotic Phenomena in Astrophysics and Cosmology

Chaos as typical property of non-linear systems has revealed its crucial role in various problems of astrophysics and cosmology. The problems discussed at these lectures include planetary dynamics, galactic dynamics, reconstruction of the substructure of clusters of galaxies, instability in Wheeler-DeWitt superspace. The choice of the problems aimed to show also the diversity of approaches and mathematical tools, which include the geometric criterion (Ricci) of relative instability in many dimensional systems, the estimation of Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, the hyperbolicity in pseudo-Riemannian spaces, etc.