8.902 | Fall 2004 | Graduate

Astrophysics II

Calendar

The calendar below provides information on the course’s lecture (L), and exam (E) sessions.

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

Epicyclic Approximation

L8 Equilibria of Stellar Systems

Boltzmann Equation

L9 Jeans’ Equations in Spherical Coordinates
L10 Jeans’ Equations Applied

Jeans’ Theorem

L11 Stability: Jeans Mass and Spiral Structure
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
E1 In-class Exam
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
E2 Three-hour Final Exam

Course Info

Departments
As Taught In
Fall 2004
Level
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Notes