ASTR 5720 Reports

Overview

This course will have no midterm. Instead, you will write a report on a paper which has appeared as an astro-ph preprint sometime within the last year.

The report will count for 15% of your grade.

Deadlines

Reports are due on Thur 13th Nov. You are welcome to submit your report before the deadline.
Please email me the astro-ph number of your paper no later than one week before the deadline, i.e. by Thur 6th Nov. You are encouraged to email the astro-ph number earlier. The numbers (and links) will be published on this page.

Guidelines

The paper should be on some topic in cosmology, but otherwise there is no restriction.

You may choose to report on a paper which is relevant to your web project.

You may not report on a paper which you have been asked to report on elsewhere. Two people may not report on the same paper.

Your report should be in two parts. The first part should describe succinctly the principal arguments and results of the paper. The second part should be in the style of a ``referee's report'', and should bring out the merits and faults of the paper. Your report should include a recommendation to publish, revise, or reject.

You should imagine that the author(s) will read the report. Therefore you should be polite but factual at all times. If you make general criticisms, you should back these up with detailed specifics.

As referee, it is your responsibility to go through the paper with a fine toothcomb to check for errors, unclear statements, and misprints. If you like, you can mark up a copy of the paper, but this should not take the place of your report.

Should you choose a good paper or a bad paper to review? Either. The advantage of a good paper is that you learn more, and it's easier to tell the author nice things about their paper. The advantage of a bad paper is that it offers more of a challenge.

Titles of Chosen Papers

Rachel Osten ``The Mass/Light Ratio of Early-Type Galaxies: Constraints from Gravitational Lensing in the Rich Cluster AC114''
Aaron Lewis ``Resolving the discrepancy between X-ray and gravitational lensing mass measurements for clusters of galaxies''
Remy Indebetouw ``Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Inflation'' contrasted with ``Can Inflation be Falsified?''
Massimo Ricotti ``How small were the first cosmological objects?''
Jason Tumlinson ``The Discovery of Primeval Galaxies and the Epoch of Galaxy Formation or ``The Epoch of Galaxy Formation''
James Boyd ``Baryonic fraction in the cold plus hot dark matter universe''
Alex Flournoy ``Baryogenesis in Brief''
Aaron Hoff ``The Local Group as a test of Cosmological Models''
Eli Michael ``Likely Values of the Cosmological Constant''
Itay Sharon ``Open Hybrid Inflation''
Matthew Beasley ``MACHOs, White Dwarfs, and the Age of the Universe''
David Olaya ``The problem of vacuum energy and cosmology''
Chet Nieter ``Dynamical Constant and Relations among Pseudo Goldstone Bosons''
Jason Lisle ``Absolute Magnitude of RR Lyrae Stars Derived from the Hipparcos Catalogue

ASTR 5720 Homepage

Updated 10/06/97