Astrophysics
Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that employs the principles of physics and chemistry "to ascertain the nature of the astronomical objects, rather than their positions or motions in space". Among the objects studied are the Sun, other stars, galaxies, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Their emissions are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the properties examined include luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition. Because astrophysics is a very broad subject, astrophysicists typically apply many disciplines of physics, including mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic and molecular physics.
Physics
Physics (from Ancient Greek: φυσική (ἐπιστήμη), translit. physikḗ (epistḗmē), lit. 'knowledge of nature', from φύσις phýsis "nature") is the natural science that studies matter and its motion and behavior through space and time and that studies the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.
Space
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.
Physics
As soon as we venture on the paths of the physicist, we learn to weigh and measure, to deal with time and space and mass and their related concepts, and to find more and more our knowledge expressed and our needs satisfied through the concept of number, as in the dreams of Plato and Pythagoras.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)
Space
[T]he program which Immanuel Kant proposed back in the 1760s... was this: our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception... Unfortunately, a great revolution took place in or about the year 1768, when he read a paper by Euler which intended to show that space was indeed absolute as Newton had suggested and not relative as Leibnitz suggested. (...in the eighteenth century the question of whether Newton's... or Leibnitz's view of the world was right profoundly affected all philosophy.) After reading Euler's argument... Kant... for the first time proposed that... we must be conscious of [absolute space] a priori. ...Kant died in 1804, long before new ideas about space... had been published... And since one of the things that happened in [our] lifetime has been the substitution of... a Leibnitz universe, the universe of relativity, for Newton's universe... we should think that out again.
Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978) Ref: Kant, "Concerning the Ultimate Foundations of the Differentiation of Regions in Space" (1768) in Kant: Selected Precritical Writings and Correspondence with Beck Tr. and Intro., G. B. Kerford and D. E. Walford (1968)