Astronomy 480

Nebulae Galaxies and Cosmology

Instructor: Caryl Gronwall

Office: 417B Davey, Office Hours: Monday 3:40 - 4:30 pm & Thursday 4 -- 5 p.m. or whenever you can find me!

TA: Jackson Norris jmn261@psu.edu

Office hours: Monday 1 - 2 pm & 4- 5 pm in 445 Davey.

Texts:
Galaxies in the Universe by Sparke and Gallagher
An Introduction to Modern Cosmology by Liddle

Note both books have substantial errata, which are listed on the web pages for the books.

Additional Reading:
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, by Carroll & Ostlie. We will refer to the "big orange book" for some background reading.

Galactic Astronomy by Binney & Merrifield (1998) and the previous edition by Mihalas & Binney (1981). This is the classic graduate text in the field.

Modern Cosmology by Dodelson. Graduate level book on cosmology.

Galaxies and Galactic Structure by Elmegreen. This is an undergraduate text at a somewhat lower level than Sparke & Gallagher but covers some topics that Sparke & Gallagher doesn't.

Modern Cosmological Observations and Problems by Bothun. Somewhat out of date, but presents a nice overview of observational cosmology.

These books, along with the required texts will be on reserve in the Science Library.

Course Syllabus in PDF format.

Astronomy Department Integrity Policy

Lectures in PDF format

Lecture 1 Tuesday, Jan 12, History of our understanding of the Milky Way and other Galaxies, Morphological Classification

• Reading: Chapter 25.1 in Carroll & Ostlie, Chapter 1.3 in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 2 Thursday, January 14, Morphological Classification, Galaxy Catalogs, Galaxy properties, coordinates
Lecture 3 Tuesday, January 19, Overview of Galaxy Photometry, extinction, luminosity functions. Begin Ellipticals.
Lecture 4 Thursday, January 21, Ellipticals

• Reading Chapter 6 in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 5 Tuesday, January 26, More ellipticals. Start spirals.
Lecture 6 Thursday, January 28, Spirals

• Reading Chapter 5 in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 7 Tuesday, February 2, More Spirals
Lecture 8 Thursday, February 4, Finishing up Spirals!
Lecture 9 Tuesday, February 9, Dwarf Galaxies

• Reading Chapter 4.1.3 & 4.4 in Sparke & Gallagher (dwarf galaxies in the Local Group)

Lecture 10 Thursday, Feb 11, Groups of Galaxies, Dynamical Friction, Interactions

• Reading Chapter 7.1 (Groups & Mergers) in Sparke & Gallagher
• Check here and here and here for some of the movies shown in class.

Lecture 11 Tuesday, Feb 16, Tidal stripping, begin clusters of Galaxies

• Reading Chapter 4.1.4 (Tidal Stripping) in Sparke & Gallagher.
• Reading Chapter 7.2 (Clusters) in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 12 Thursday, Feb 18, Clusters of galaxies
Lecture 13 Tuesday, Feb 23, Finish up clusters, gravitational lensing

• Reading Chapter 7.4 (Gravitational Lensing) in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 14 Thursday, Feb 25, Active Galactic Nuclei

• Reading Chapter 9.1 (Active Galactic Nuclei) & 9.2.3 (Superluminal Motion) in Sparke & Gallagher
• Link to many of the AGN images/plots shown in class, plus a bunch more courtesy of Bill Keel can be found here.

Lecture 15 Tuesday, Mar 2, Finish up AGN, Emission-Line Spectroscopy, & begin Galaxy Evolution

• Cool movie of the motions of stars around the central BH in the Milky Way can be found here.

Midterm Exam Thursday, Mar 4, in class.
Lecture 16 Tuesday, March 16, Galaxy Evolution

• Reading 8.3.2, 9.3 & 9.4 in Sparke & Gallagher

Lecture 17 Thursday, March 19, Finish up galaxy evolution

• Here is a link to the DEEP2 paper by Faber et al that I discussed in class.

Lecture 18 Tuesday, March 23, Intro to Cosmology

• Reading Ch. 1.4 & 8.2 in Sparke & Gallagher
• Chapters 1-5 in Liddle, don't worry they're short!
• Also see Ch. 29 in Carroll & Ostlie

Lecture 19 Thursday, March 25, Intro to Cosmolgy & the Age of the Universe

• Chapter 6-8 & Advanced Topic 2 in Liddle
• Here is the very useful paper by David Hogg on "Distance Measures in Cosmology" that derives all of the equations we discussed in class in detail. The plots shown in class are from this paper.

Lecture 20 Tuesday, March 29, Finish age of the universe, Begin Extragalactic Distance Scale

• Chapter 27.1 in Carroll & Ostlie
• See the reviews by Jensen et al. (2003) here (PDF file) and by Jacoby et al. (1992) here (PDF file).
• Also, Chapter 2 in Bothun (on reserve in Science Library).
• Parts of Sections 2.1 & 2.2 in Sparke and Gallagher discuss parallax, main sequence fitting, and RR Lyraes. Section 4.1.2 discusses Cepheids and RR Lyraes. Pages 316-318 discuss surface brightness fluctuations.
• John Huchra's Hubble Constant page.

Lecture 21 Thursday, April 2, Extragalactic Distance Scale: Tully-Fisher, Dn-sigma, Surface Brightness Fluctuations, & Type 1a SNe. The H0 Key Project.

• See the Supernova Cosmology Project and High-Z Supernova Search web pages. There is a good review of the results from both teams here (PDF file).
  Review of H0 Key Project results from Freedman et al.
  

Lecture 22 Tuesday, April 6, Finish extragalactic Distance Scale & Evidence for a Cosmological Constant from Type Ia SN, Start Large Scale Structure

• Large-scale structure is discussed in Ch. 8.1 in Sparke & Gallagher and Advanced Topics 5.1 - 5.3 in Liddle
  
• There are also the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey web pages.

Lecture 23 Thursday, April 8, Dark Matter

• Chapter 9 in Liddle
• For fun listen to the Dark Matter Rap (mp3) by David Weinberg at Ohio State University. You can read the lyrics here.

Lecture 24 Tuesday, April 13, Finish up Dark Matter, Inflation, and the Cosmic Microwave Background

• Chapters 10 & 13 in Liddle, also Advanced Topic 5.4
• Ch. 29.2 & 30.1 in Carroll & Ostlie
  
• Also check out the CMB tutorial from Wayne Hu, and other useful links on his CMB physics page.
  
• Finally, there are the COBE and WMAP home pages!
  

Lecture 25 Thursday, April 15, Finish up CMB, Early Universe & Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

• Chapters 11 & 12 in Liddle
• Ch 1.5 in Sparke & Gallagher
  
• Ch. 29.2 in Carroll & Ostlie
  

Lecture 26 Tuesday, April 20, Hierarchical Structure Formation & Galaxy Formation

• Ch 8.4 & 8.5 in Sparke & Gallagher
  
• Advanced Topic 5.5 in Liddle
  
• Ch. 30.2 in Carroll & Ostlie
  
• Ch 4.3 in Sparke & Gallagher
  
• Check out some structure formation simulations here, also there are some nice movies of the simulations here.
• Check out some galaxy formation movies here.

Final Exam Tuesday, May 4, 10:10 - noon. Here is the list of constants and equations that was handed out for a previous final exam in this course.

Problem Set 5

Ned Wright's Cosmology Calculator You should also check out the cosmology tutorial (see link below).

Files for Problem Set 1

• Globular Cluster Data File for Problem 2
• Problem 4: Classify the following galaxies by Revised Hubble Type (as defined by Sandage in the Hubble Atlas found in the reading room). You will find looking at the Hubble Atlas for prototypes very helpful and you will probably want to read the introduction to the Hubble Atalas as well. Give a brief, one line explanation for your type for each galaxy.
  • Galaxy 1
  • Galaxy 2
  • Galaxy 3
  • Galaxy 4
  • Galaxy 5
  • Galaxy 6
  • Galaxy 7
  • Galaxy 8
  • Galaxy 9
  • Galaxy 10
  • Galaxy 11
• Now that you're a galaxy classification expert, you can classify some galaxies at the Galaxy Zoo!

Useful Links

Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial

Check out the Ultra Deep Field

And the 2009 verson (in the near-IR), HUDF09

Astrophysical Data System
Astro-ph preprint server
Annual Reviews
Steinn's LaTeX primer
AASTeX Package
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
More on the Shapley-Curtis Debate
Check here and here for summer research opportunities.