Ay 21 Webpage - Galaxies and Cosmology - Winter 2024
http://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~george/ay21/ = tinyurl.com/ay21class
Instructor: George Djorgovski, djorgovski at caltech.edu
Office hours: email the instructor
TA: Pranav Nagarajan, pnagaraj at caltech.edu
Office hours: Thursday, 5:30-6:30 pm, in 219 Cahill
Lectures: Mon & Wed, 2-3 pm, Hameetan auditorium, Cahill
Recitation Section: Fridays, 2-3 pm, 219 Cahill. Attendance is required
Class syllabus, summary, grading, collaboration policy, etc. (pdf)
Caltech students have access to the online version of a textbook,
Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology by P. Schneider (Caltech login required).
In addition, slides and videos of the lectures will be posted below, as we go along.
Homeworks and exams:
See the Canvas website. They will be posted on Fridays at 5 pm (unless otherwise noted), and be due on the following Friday at 2 pm, also on Canvas.
Lectures:
We are recording them and the playlist is here. The raw recordings and the streaming links are here.
You also have access to an earlier version playlist
here. The corresponding lecture links are provided below but will be replaced with new ones when ready.
- Lecture 1: Introduction and Some History
- Lecture 2: The Basics of the Relativistic Cosmology
- Lecture 3: Cosmological Models and Distances
- Lecture 4: Cosmological Distance Scale
- Lecture 5: Cosmological Tests
- Lecture 6: The Early Universe
- Lecture 7: The Contents of the Universe
- Video
- Slides (pdf)
- Schneider - bits and pieces here and there
- Wikipedia article on dark matter is a good summary with the links
- Wikipedia article on dark energy is also OK
- There are many resources about gravitational lensing on the Web
- Lecture 8: Structure Formation and Growth
- Video
- Slides (pdf)
- Schneider Chapter 7, 10.6, 10.7
- Images and movies from numerical simulations (many more are available on the web):
- Lecture 9: Large Scale Structure: Observations
- Lecture 10: Bias, Evolution of Clustering, and Galaxy Clusters
- Lecture 11: Galaxies, Hubble Sequence and its Origins, Spirals
- Lecture 12: Elliptical Galaxies, Dwarfs, and Scaling Relations
- Lecture 13: Galaxy Evolution
- Lecture 14: Star Formation History, Chemical Evolution of Galaxies, and Intergalactic Medium
- Lecture 15: Young and Forming Galaxies
- Lecture 16: Quasars, AGN, and Supermassive Black Holes
- Lecture 17: Quasars at High Energies, Evolution and Formation of Quasars and Supermassive Black Holes
Other useful stuff:
Physical and Astronomical Constants
Fluxes and Magnitudes
CosmoCalc by Ned Wright *
Advanced version *
Time converting *
A. Robotham's CosmoCalc
Some additional readings that you may find interesting:
Last changed: 8Mar24, SGD