Astr 511: Galactic Astronomy

Tuesday 1:40 – 3:00 pm, Thursday 1:40 – 3:00pm, PAB B356A

Class Materials

• Syllabus.
• Required reading: Galactic Stellar Populations in the Era of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Other Large Surveys.
• Strongly suggested reading: The Milky Way's stellar disk.
• Strongly suggested reading: The stellar halo of the Galaxy.
• An LSST document on astronomical signal-to-noise calculation and flux extraction.
• astroML: a python-based library with a lot of exceedingly useful astronomical, statistical, data mining and visualization code.
• Cminus: python code from astroML for computing luminosity function using Lynden-Bell's (1971) Cminus estimator.

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).

Help on printing lectures with 4 pages on each printout page.

• Lecture 1: Review of stellar astrophysics.
• Lecture 2: Open and globular clusters and simple stellar populations.
• Lecture 3: Review of galaxy properties and galaxies in SDSS.
• Lecture 4: Luminosity and mass functions.
• Lecture 5: Basic Properties of the Milky Way.
• Lecture 6: Stellar count distribution in the Milky Way.
• Lecture 7: Stellar metallicity distribution in the Milky Way.
• Lecture 8: Stellar kinematics in the Milky Way; Parts I and II.
• Lecture 9: Evidence for dark matter in the Milky Way.
• Lecture 10: The Milky Way, LSST and Gaia.

• Review Lecture: Stellar kinematics: a bit of theory.

Term (Seminar) Projects

• Github repo for submitting projects and homeworks.

Project 1 (due Jan 29)

• Assignment.
• Gzipped data file.

Project 2 (due Feb 17)

• Assignment.
• Gzipped “truth” data file: LSSTsimWDtruth60.dat.gz.
• Gzipped “observed” data file: LSSTsimWDobs60.dat.gz.
• “True” disk luminosity function data file: WDlumfuncDisk.dat.
• “True” halo luminosity function data file: WDlumfuncHalo.dat.
• Short description of the modeled white dwarf population.
• Example of a differential luminosity function plot.

Project 3

• Project Description.

Related Links and Materials

• How to give a killer (TED) presentation.
• Simulations of galaxy encounters.
• The Milky Way explorer by Kevin Jardine—a very useful resource!
• Space coloring book for children (and others).