Lecture Notes

The lecture notes were taken in the Fall of 2001 by Jeremy Schnittman, who as a student in the subject, agreed to take notes and to format them using LaTeX. He used Professor Paul Schechter's handwritten notes in producing them. The figures were produced by Caitlin Millard during June-August 2004. Used with permission. As of the date of publication, only lecture notes for sessions 1 through 11 were available.

SES # TOPICS LECTURE NOTES
L1 Introduction: What is a Galaxy? (PDF)
L2 How Do You Build a Galaxy? (PDF)
L3 How are Galaxies Described? (PDF)
L4 Gravitational Potentials: General Results (PDF)
L5 Interesting and Special Cases (PDF)
L6 Orbits in Spherical Potentials and Integrals (PDF)
L7 Orbits in Axisymmetric Potentials

Epicyclic Approximation
(PDF)
L8 Equilibria of Stellar Systems

Boltzmann Equation
(PDF)

(PDF)
L9 Jeans' Equations in Spherical Coordinates (PDF)
L10 Jeans' Equations Applied

Jeans' Theorem
(PDF)
L11 Stability: Jeans Mass and Spiral Structure (PDF)
L12 Gravitational Mirages (aka lenses) via Fermat's Principle
L13 Applied Gravitational Lensing
L14 Weak Lensing
L15 Clusters of Galaxies
L16 Physics in Clusters of Galaxies
L17 The Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect
L18 Cosmology: Recent History and a Serviceable Newtonian Model
L19 The Spherical Model
L20 Recombination
L21 From Fields to Objects: The Press-Schecter Recipe
L22 Adding GR to Cosmology
L23 Distances in Cosmology
L24 Cosmological Parameters
L25 Growing Modes in Expanding Universes: Jeans Redux
L26 Growing Modes: Radiation Dominated and Non-baryonic Universes
L27 Statistical Measures of Cosmic Structure
L28 The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Fluctuations
L29 Cosmological Helium Production
L30 Details of Helium Production
L31 Absorbers along Quasar Lines of Sight
L32 Active Galactic Nuclei
L33 The Black Hole Paradigm for AGN
L34 Accretion Disks
L35 Superluminality and Jets
L36 Extragalactic Sky Brightness: Present and Past Superposed
L37 Bonus Lecture #1
L38 Bonus Lecture #2