ASTR 5720 Syllabus Fall 1997
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Grading
Grading will be weighted as follows:
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
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Updated 08/26/97