Physics 240, "Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology"

This material can be found online at URL

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/phys240.html

Outline for the course, class schedule, etc.

Grades for the course are now available.

Lectures

Introduction, some background, and units. You might want to make a copy of the equations we'll use in this course.
Astronomy in the News and Spectra
The Milky Way (a review of sorts)
Other views of the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Galaxy Taxonomy
The Local Group: who are the galaxies in your neighborhood?
Groups and Clusters of Galaxies
Here Be Monsters: Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and quasars
Black Holes at the centers of galaxies
Christmas Break
Gamma Ray Bursts: The Past
Gamma Ray Bursts: The Present and Future

Midterm occurs on Tuesday, Jan 9
Astronomy in the News
Theory of Gravitational Lensing
Microlensing
What have we learned from Gravitational Lenses?
The Cosmological Distance Ladder
Step I: The Size of the Earth and Solar System
Step II: The distances to nearby stars via parallax
Step III: Using the color-magnitude diagram
Step IV: Cepheids and the distance to the LMC
Step V: Using Cepheids to measure distances to nearby galaxies
Step VI: Estimating distances to distant galaxies
Relics from the past
The distance/velocity connection
The Chemical Composition of Stars and the Universe
The Cosmic Microwave Background
Models of the Universe
The Big Bang Model
What are the proper parameters?
The future of the Universe
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Astronomy in the News
Suggested problems to review for the final

Final occurs Friday, Feb 23, 9:15 - 11:15 AM, 08-2300

Homework Assignments

Stellar motions near the center of the Milky Way
The Andromeda Galaxy
If you use the WWW form interface to SkyView instead of the Java interface, watch out for tricky false color images in astronomy ...
Because of bad weather, some people were unable to do the "Radius of the Earth" assignment. Therefore, I've created a backup for it. You must turn in one of the two following assignments -- either is acceptable. You are free to turn in both, of course!
- Measure the radius of the Earth
  Due Friday, Jan 26, at 5:00 PM.
- How much better are Hipparcos measurements?
  Due Friday, Feb 2, at 5:00 PM.
Measure the distance to downtown Rochester

Reading material

There are two textbooks for this class. In addition, some of the material you need to read is taken from a small set of popular science magazines: Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy, New Scientist. You can find all these in the RIT Library. I have collected articles from recent issues of these journals and placed them on electronic reserve. In order to access them, you need to know the login name and password for the course.

You can find a list of reading materials and instructions for accessing them on the Reading Materials page.

Other resources

The Astronomy Picture of the Day
Bill Keel's collection of portraits of Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei
Bill Keel has also created a WWW version of his upper-level undergraduate course on Galaxies and the Universe.
The Astrophysics Data Service (ADS) Abstract Service allows you to search for articles on astronomical topics, and read on-line most of the papers it finds.
CCD images of the Messier Objects
NSSDC Photo Gallery of Galaxies and Globular Clusters
Images of Galaxies and Quasars at radio wavelengths from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Galaxies as seen by 2MASS, an infrared survey
Astronomy: The Cosmic Journey An astro textbook in HTML form.
The IPAC Level5 Knowledgebase for Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology The real deal: technical papers by the astronomers themselves. Not for the faint of heart....
Students for the Exploration and Development of Space have an excellent website, with all kinds of information on astronomy and space science.

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Feb 20, 2001.