The URL of this page is http://planets.utsc.utoronto.ca/~pawel/AST1420/
This way to the home page of
Pawel Artymowicz.
The cluster of galaxies EMSS 1358 6245 is about 4 billion light-years away in
constellation Draco. When imaged with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists
determined the mass of dark matter there is four times larger than normal
matter. See the
Chandra image here.
GRADUATE COURSE INFORMATION
Title: Galactic Structure and Dynamics, AST1420
Term: Fall 2009
Starts: 18 Sept. Friday 10am
Lecturer: Pawel Artymowicz (UTSC: tel 416-287-7244 rm 649A; at DAA: 416-978-6550, rm 220; in emergency: cell 416-358-4275)
When: Fridays 10am-12noon
Place: AB 113 (to be confirmed!)
Subject
The emphasis of this course is on the theoretical understanding and modeling
of the dynamics of galaxies, including: gravitational potential-density pairs,
Poisson solvers, orbits, stellar dynamics of collisionless systems
rotation curves and dark haloes, spiral structure in gas disks, tidal radius,
dynamical friction and mergers, AGNs. We will make digressions
on observations, but the spirit of the course is theoretical.
Our basic reference will be Binney and Tremaine book (2nd ed., see below).
Syllabus (old, will be modified)
A text file you can easily pre-view or print.
Format
Listening to lectures will not be the only or even the main method of learning. Instead,
we will gain hands-on experience while solving some galactic dynamics problems.
You will also solve short sets of theoretical problems.
Some of them will requireprogramming and/or plotting. Skills, such as
Fourier-transforming data and numerically solving equations, will be developed
as an important by-product of the course.
The texts, if not necessarily all the solutions, of the assignments will be
provided here. The solutions will be discussed during the lectures.
You will also have a chance to select one item you like best from a
list of topics for individual study (see below), and to present the results
of a literature search near the end of the course in a 30 min. presentation.
Finally, there will be reading assignments, predominantly from the main
textbook below.
Lectures, or things useful for lectures
L1+2-AST1420.ppt
L3+4-AST1420.ppt
L7+8-AST1420.ppt
L18-AST1420.ppt
L19-AST1420.ppt
L20-AST1420.ppt
Literature
J. Binney & S. Tremaine "Galactic Dynamics"
(Princeton, 2008 - 2nd edition) [main textbook]
You most probably will want to keep it as a researcher, therefore it
makes sense to buy this new edition. Older editions are also useful but why not get a
a recently upgraded version.
It's only USD 47.79 new, on Amazon. When it's out
of print, it will cost more. Amazon sells used versions of most book cheaper,
please go to www.amazon.ca and check what's available.
Other books worth looking at, among others for your presentation:
J. Krolik "Active Galactic Nuclei" (Princeton 1998); currently USD 59.35 new on Amazon.
J. Binney & M. Merrifield "Galactic Astronomy" (Princeton, 1999 and newer)
Annual Reviews in Astr. & Astroph., and research papers.
Those of you who did not go through a regular full semester UPPER
undergraduate course on Galaxies and/or do not feel strong enough about galaxies on that level are strongly advised to read:
(i) "Galactic Structure" by Debra M. Elmegreen,
(ii) chapters 24-26 from B. Carroll and D.
Ostlie "Modern Astrophysics" brick, (and chapt.
27-28 which, however, are less relevant to our course) or, better yet,
(iii) the textbook by L. Sparke and J. Gallagher titled "Galaxies in the Universe: an Introduction" (2nd ed.
2007).
The Sparke and Gallagher book has short chapters closely following Binney and
Tremaine exposition on dynamics, but has much more descriptive and introductory
matter on non-dynamical issues. It is advisable to read slides from the
undergrad course ASTC22
to know what kind of knowledge is assumed.
We don't want to spend time on repeating undergraduate-level material
(too much :-). If you somehow solve all the graduate assignments but show a lack
of basic (undergrad) understanding of the structure and working of galaxies during
the oral part of exam, you may lose valuable points.
For integrals, the best reference is Gradshteyn and Ryzhik, "Table of integrals,
series and products", Academic Press.
There are also these extremely useful books on computing algorithms
and mathematical functions, some available online for free (downloadable chapters)
from http://www.nrbook.com/a/ :
"Numerical Recipes in C", 3rd Edition (2003) by Press et al., and
"Numerical recipes in Fortran77" (1992) by Press et al.
"Numerical recipes in Fortran90" (1992) by Press et al. (different, parallel algorithms)
[These classic collections of subroutines will relieve you from the task of
coding some time-proven methods for curve fitting, optimization, statistics,
matrix inversion, fft, and so on, which as a scientist you'll do quite often.
Not only that, but the book provides a very good explanation of how these
methods really work, so you don't feel you're using a black box device, and can
even go in and understand what brakes in them if your NR-based routine ever does
spit out unpleasentries on the screen. The source code of subroutines from all editions
and language versions is sold separately on CD for about CAD 84 by Amazon; those few routines that we will use will be available to course participants, if short enough they
can also be typed directly, as the NR books contain full code listings.]
Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions"
(10th corr. printing, 1970; downloadable from the NR site above).
[This book will explain all those spherical harmionics, Airy and
Bessel functions, it actually also has parts on
how to computer-code the evaluation of special functions, so you could
in principle write your very own routine for, say, J0(x), or error
function.]
Chris Matzner's
Resources for the ambitious undergraduate or beginning graduate researcher
For those interested in ambitious numerical projects, computational
astrophysics right now is embracing the revolutionary new methods of computation
on the graphics hardware (GPUs). See
CUDA Zone for more on that. In early 2010, the nVidia cards with new architecture
called Fermi will become available. They'll allow full use of double precision arithmetic
and 6GB of ECC (correction-coded) RAM, if needed. One GPU will have 512 computing cores and more
number crunching power than some recently built CPU-based supercomputers.
Incidentally, CUDA --an extension to C language-- is not only for
C-programmers. There exist interfaces to Python, Fortran and Matlab, as well as Java and IDL. If you decide to learn CUDA, you'll be given access to a
GPU personal supercomputer cudak3, housed here at DAA. This is not required, but would certainly be exciting
and would positively affect your final score for the
numerical part of this course.
Grading scheme
The home assignments, many of which involve the use of a computer,
will be collected and graded, entering the final evaluation
with a weight of 37%. Please keep a paper copy or a computer file of your solution.
It's important; you don't want to know those terrible things that sometimes happen to your
solutions.. Also, this way you can compare your solution with the posted one
immediately. Late submissions generate fewer points.
In-class presentation (and writeup) is 13%.
This sums up to 50% so far. The rest is the final exam:
Term project (equivalent to a take-home final written exam) is 28%.
A final oral exam will be worth 22% of the total score.
Presentations of individual studies
As mentioned, everyone will have a chance to read literature, and give a 30-min presentation. A writeup of several pages will also be prepared and shared with all the students and the lecturer, who will
read it and prepare at least 3 relevant questions resulting
from their reading.
Please avoid the common error of going over time;
you won't be very popular with the students, as well as
all future audience at seminars etc (if you get into that bad habit).
The following topics are proposed, but
may still change during the course (you may propose your favorite
topic too! It should have non-trivial theoretical component.):
Nuclear disks in the Galactic Center and other galaxies including AGNs.
Properties of the inferred black holes, new examples.
Do we live in a barred galaxy? In one disk or two disks (the thin and the
thick)? Recent studies of the shape and components of the Milky Way.
Are galaxies transparent or opaque? The issue of internal dust absorption
in disk galaxies.
Current topics in the dynamics of spiral waves. Spiral structure: waves
or modes?
Polar rings around galaxies: stable or transient structures?
Galaxies in the early universe vs. today. The implications of HST images,
in particular Hubble Deep Fields.
Mergers of galaxies: an in-depth review of issues and methods.
The non-conformist galaxies: counter-rotating disks, leading spirals.
Wave excitation by bar-like or point-like potentials.
Goldreich, P.; Tremaine, S. 1979 "The excitation of density waves at the Lindblad and corotation resonances by an external potential" - read, understand, describe.
This is a fundamental paper on 1st order perturbation theory of galactic and any other
disks, resonances and waves. Do this study if you plan to work on disk dynamics.
Assignments
Latex is great for writing up those great solutions of yours.
Here is the
tutorial on LaTeX. Get used to it and you'll have an easy time writing up
papers and thesis in the future. Hand-written work is acceptable, if readable.
Galactic Term Project (written final exam)
The final assignment is a relatively large term project.
Please click
here
to
find out about the 2009 topics.