William C. Keel
Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30-10:45, 328 Gallalee
There is no regular textbook for this course, but extensive lecture notes are being placed on the web at http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies as the course proceeds. There is also a shelf of useful reference books (either my copy or the library's). Office hours are 1:30-3:00 Wednesday or by appointment at other times (you all know where my office is...). The grade will be based on a set of homework exercises plus a final project (a practice proposal), without in-class tests.
| 24 Aug | Introduction - the Universe of galaxies and their discovery; data sources |
| 29 Aug | Morphological classification of galaxies; morphological components |
| 31 Aug | Quantitative classification. Global properties, systematics, scaling laws, luminosity function, biases |
| 5 Sept | Gas in galaxies |
| 7 Sept | Dust in galaxies |
| 12 Sept | Stellar populations in galaxies |
| 14 Sept | Star formation indicators; starburst systems |
| 19 Sept | Environmental effects on galaxies |
| 21 Sept | Dynamics of galaxies (including central masses) |
| 26 Sept | Dark matter in galaxies |
| 28 Sept | The Hubble constant and extragalactic distance scale |
| 3 Oct | "Exotic" distance indicators |
| 5 Oct | Galaxy grouping, compact groups |
| 10 Oct | Clusters of galaxies |
| 12 Oct | Large scale structure, biasing, clues to galaxy formation |
| 17 Oct | Hot intracluster gas and its history; the intergalactic medium |
| 24 Oct | Interactions and mergers |
| 26 Oct | Active galactic nuclei - radio sources, taxonomy |
| 31 Oct | AGN - emission-line interpretation |
| 2 Nov | AGN - structure and models. Relativistic flows - jets, superluminal motion, gamma-ray bursts |
| 7 Nov | AGN host galaxies and alternate models |
| 9 Nov | Evolution of galaxies (1) |
| 14 Nov | Evolution of galaxies (2) |
| 16 Nov | Evolution of AGN, the galaxy connection |
| 21 Nov | Classical observational cosmology |
| 28 Nov | Cosmology in the simple Friedman universe; acceleration |
| 30 Nov | Galaxies and reionization. The first stars |
| 5 Dec | Galaxy formation |
| 7 Dec | Recombination and before - microwave background radiation, perturbations and nucleosynthesis |
Last changes: 8/2006 © 2002-6