ASTR 5460, Fall 2004, Brotherton Instructor

Galaxy Structure and Evolution; Cosmology (AKA "Extragalactic Astronomy")

This is a graduate level class designed to provide the basics of extragalactic astronomy, complimentary to the department's "Stars and the Milky Way" course (ASTR 5440). There is a textbook: Galaxies and Cosmology, 2nd edition, by Combes, Boisse, Mazure, and Blanchard. There will also be supplemental material.

The powerpoint presentations below are best viewed with Internet Explorer.

• Morphology and Classification of Galaxies: Sep. 1, 2004
• Files associated with homework 1
• More morphology and classification, start on kinematics : Sep. 8, 2004
• More Kinematics and Masses (and Clusters -- also covers 9/15): Sep. 13, 2004
• Files associated with homework 2
• Monday will be IRAF work in Lab. Wednesday's lecture will be on Elliptical Galaxies (Combes Ch. 4): Sep. 22, 2004
• Spiral Structure (Combes Ch. 5, parts): Sep. 29, 2004
• Galaxy Simulations (Combes Ch. 7): Oct. 4, 2004
• More Galaxy Interactions (Combes Ch. 7): Oct. 6, 2004
• Some detailed solutions associated with the simulation problems in homework 3.
• Radio Sources (Combes Ch. 8): Oct. 11-13, 2004
• Active Galactic Nuclei (Combes Ch. 9): Oct. 18-27, 2004
• Note for the homework: I've downloaded and placed all the Hubeny et al. accretion disk models locally in /d/users/mbrother/disks for your convenience.
• Large Scale Structure (Combes Ch. 11): Nov. 3, 2004
• Galaxy Formation (Combes Ch. 12): Nov. 8-10, 2004
• Cosmology (Combes Ch. 13, other resources): Nov. 15-17, 2004
• Cosmology (Compilation of Lecture slides mostly from Longair): Nov. 15-17, 2004
• Thermal History of the Universe (Chap. 9 Longair): Nov. 29-Dec. 1, 2004
• Abundances of the Light Elements (Chap. 10 Longair): Dec. 6-8, 2004

Links/items you might find of use (will be regularly updated):

The course syllabus in postscript format.

An article at Science News giving a high-level overview about some issues of dark energy, the cosmological constant, and the ultimate fate of our universe.

Mark Whittle's webpage which features BIG BANG Acoustics, including movies and the sounds of the universe, the acoustic waves, shifted to audible frequencies. Also note the work involvinge AGN jet-cloud interactions.

Ned Wright's webpage which includes tutorials at a range of levels as well as his very useful javascript cosmology calculator.

Wayne Hu's webpage which includes great tutorials at a range of levels, and many of them!

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia uses my Keck near-IR image of UN J1025-0040, uncredited, for its entry on quasars.

Look here for the proceedings of a meeting on Jet-Cloud Interactions. Some cool stuff. For an example of a jet smacking into a galaxy, see Best P. N., Röttgering H. J. A., Longair M. S., 2000, MNRAS, 311, 23.

Real-time VLBI: this article.

Travis suggests a better on-line source about LaTeX.

A news article about X-ray emission from colliding galaxy clusters.

AASTeX website is your one-stop shopping for LaTeX templates (samples and downloads) and additional documentation.

A plotting package I particularly like is called Super Mongo. It is called from linux with "sm". The linked page has sm manuals, examples, and more.

An on-line resource you'll find useful and necessary for this course is NED, which stands for NASA Extragalactic Database. It's good for finding out about individual objects as well as a source of review papers.

I use IRAF to do my data reduction and analysis. IRAF is documented in a number of places (as it different parts are written in a number of places). The usually most useful site, is from NOAO, and it has tutorials for basic CCD image/spectroscopy reductions.

NASA's Astrophysical Data System, or ADS, is very useful, primarily as a way to look up papers online. Suggested exercise: look up the papers by the astronomers in the department.

Astronomy Picture of the Day is a great webpage to visit every day.

So is the astro-ph preprint server.

Bill Keel has on-line lecture notes for a similar course he teaches at this link.