ASTR 5720 Syllabus Fall 1997

Grading

Grading will be weighted as follows:

Problem Sets	50%
Web Project	35%
Report	15%

I will drop the worst 10% of your score, and rescale back up to 100%.

Content

The course will be divided into three parts:

The Smooth Universe
The Lumpy Universe
Statistics

The Statistics part will appear a short way into the Lumpy Universe. Although statistics will be developed with cosmology as the example, the concepts are widely applicable in astronomy.

1. The Smooth Universe

7 weeks.

Overview (Ch 4; 1 lecture)
Cosmological Models (Chs 1 & 2; 2 weeks)
Observational Properties (Chs 4, 2 planetarium visits)
Hot Big Bang, Recombination, Cosmic Microwave Background (Chs 5, 9; 1 week)
Nucleosynthesis of Light Elements (Ch 8; 1 week)
Inflation (Ch 7; 1 week)

2. The Lumpy Universe

5 weeks

Linear Growth of Fluctuations (Chs 10, 11; 1 lecture)
Baryons - Photons - Dark Matter (Chs 12, 13; 1 week)
Generation of Fluctuations during Inflation (Ch 14; 1 lecture)
Nonlinear Growth (Ch 15; 1 week)
The Power Spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (Ch 17; 1 lecture)
Peculiar Velocities (Ch 18; 1 lecture)
Galaxy Formation, The Intergalactic Medium (Ch 19; 1 lecture)

3. Statistics

2 weeks

Correlation Functions, Central Limit Theorem, Gaussian Distribution (1 week)
Bayes' Theorem, Likelihood Function, Parameter Estimation, Fisher Information Matrix (1 week)

Fiske Planetarium

Thur 18 Sept ``Milky Way, Local Group''
Thur 2 Oct ``Galaxies''
Thur 9 Oct ``Big Bang''

Text

Coles P. & Lucchin F. (1995) ``Cosmology: The Origin and Evolution of Cosmic Structure'', John Wiley & Sons.

ASTR 5720 Homepage

Updated 08/26/97