Astr 509: Astrophysics III
Tuesday 1:00 – 2:20 pm, Thursday 2:30 – 3:50pm, PAB B356A
Class Materials
Lecture Notes
“I must confess that the lectures of these men netted me no perceptible gain. It was obvious that Helmholtz never prepared his lectures properly... Kirchhoff was the very opposite... but it would sound like a memorized text, dry and monotonous.” —Max Planck (Scientific Autobiography and other Papers, p. 15, Williams & Nolgate, London, 1950).
- Lecture 1: The observational overview with emphasis on the Milky Way and SDSS.
- Lecture 2: Potential theory I—spherical systems and potential, density pairs.
- Lecture 3: Potential theory II—multipole expansion and disk potentials.
- Lecture 4: Potential theory III—the Milky Way potential and numerical methods.
- Lecture 5: The orbits of stars—static spherical potentials.
- Lecture 6: The orbits of stars—axisymmetric potentials.
- Lecture 7: The collisionless Boltzmann equation.
- Lecture 8: The Jeans equations.
- Lecture 9: Applications of the Jeans equations, the virial theorem.
- Lecture 10: More about the virial theorem.
- Lecture 11: The isothermal sphere and slab, King models, the Jeans instability.
- Lecture 12: Disk dynamics, spiral arms and bars—introduction.
- Lecture 13: Disk dynamics: spiral arms and bars as instabilities.
- Lecture 14: Collisions I—tidal tails, dynamical friction.
- Lecture 15: Collisions II—scattering of disk stars.
- Lecture 16: The gravothermal catastrophy, the Fokker-Planck approximation.
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