- Reminder: Midterm Exam on Wed, March 27
- Reminder: The Term Paper must be in ApJ Letters format, and this will require you to be fluent in LaTeX. There will be no formal instruction on LaTeX in this course. Links to the ApJL style files are located on our class Astr 640 home page.
Suggested reading:
Echo Mapping of Broad H beta Emission in NGC 5548 Horne, K., Welsh, W.F. & Peterson, B.M. 1991 ApJ 367, L5. Definitely read the textbook and the other echo mapping paper first.
Mar 4:
Here are two recent very nice "big picture" review papers (in .pdf format):
- Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars, 2010-2020 Science White Paper for the 2009 NRC Decadal Review by Elvis et al.
- The Origins and the Early Evolution of Quasars and Supermassive Black Holes by Djorgovski et al.
- A great web site on Magnetars, Soft Gamma Repeaters & Very Strong Magnetic Fields by Robert C. Duncan, University of Texas at Austin
Additional Reading: ``Introduction to Unified Schemes'' by Wills B.J. in ``Quasars and Cosmology'', A.S.P. Conference Series (1999), eds. G.Ferland, J.Baldwin (San Francisco: ASP): astro-ph/9905093.
Feb 27:
- We are extending the due date for term paper topic proposals from March 1 to March 6. Present a short (< 1 page) typed "proposal" for your topic including a partial bibiography. The proposal does not have to be in LaTeX.
- Please read John Kormendy's "Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei" web page.
Feb 20:
- Link to the IAU Symposium The Galactic Center: Feeding and Feedback in a Normal Galactic Nucleus.
- Here is the article Infrared Adaptive Optics Reveals Stars Orbiting Within Light-Hours of the Milky Way's Center by Bertram Schwarzschild in Physics Today 2003 February: http://www2.physics.umd.edu/~jacobson/171c/ourbhart.htm This is a somewhat old, but excellent article.
- Related to observations of Sag A*, for those interested in learning more about speckles and atmospheric seeing, check out the following site: Nick Strobel's Astronomy Notes on Seeing.
- For homework #3, you can ignore GR effects other than gravitational redshift, as they don't come into play. For example, Q2 asks what energy is released upon impact; it does not ask what luminosity is seen by an observer far from the NS - that would require consideration of GR effects. BUT don't ignore special relativity unless it is justifiable.
Feb 6:
When reading Accretion Power Ch 2.1-2.4, don't worry too much about the details - just try to get a feel for what's going on. Pay attention to the meaning of the sound speed, as we will see this over and over. Although it is mathematically elegant, we are going to skip section 2.5 on spherical accretion (also called Bondi-Hoyle accretion) because it has limited astrophysical consequence (and we've plenty of other things we need to get to!). Likewise, we are going to skip Ch 3. If you want a head start, the next reading assignment after Ch 2 will include Ch 7.1-7.6.
- Sag A*: Galactic Center Research at MPE (Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik)
Galactic center animated gif "movie" from the MPE group (small mpeg "movie")
- More on the SMBH at Sag A*:
Prof. Andrea Ghez and the UCLA Galactic Center Group
An animation of stellar orbits in the central pc (from the UCLA Galactic Center Group).
And from the GCNEWS - A Newsletter for Galactic Center Research:
- Recent Advances Made with a Decade of Diffraction-Limited Data From the W. M. Keck 10 meter Telescopes A. M. Ghez
- On the Road Toward a Deeper Understanding of Sgr A* and its Environment R. Schoedel, R. Genzel, F.K. Baganoff, & A. Eckart
Jan 30:
- Homework #1 due date is postponed to Friday Feb 1 at 1pm.
- For those who need some help with LaTeX, see my web page for Astr 680 and look under the title "More Tools and Resources" (about 2/3 down the page). You'll find a sample LaTeX file with a minimal set of instructions on how to use LaTeX. There's other info there that might be of use to you too.
- Suggestion: Get the astro-ph preprint version of the NGC 4258 Herrnstein, et al. paper on the arXive preprint server: astro-ph/9907013. For the Myioshi et al paper, you may need to get a copy from the library, since the journal Nature does not allow all its articles to be available on the ADS.
- A very nice website about AGN: Bill Keel's (University of Alabama) rich source of images and notes on Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei. In particular, take a look at the following pages: (i) Optical spectra of various kinds of active galactic nuclei and (ii) "...Joe Miller once mused that we didn't know whether quasars were merely interesting, or actually important." Find out the answer at: Quasar Astronomy Forty Years On
Jan 28:
For every homework question, think about the purpose of the question. What is the deeper meaning? Getting the right answer is only part of the questions. The main part is to think about what this means: what are the implications?
- From Level 5 "A Knowledgebase for Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology", here is Chapter 1 of Peterson's "An Introduction to Active Galactic Nuclei"
- Sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey SDSS quasar spectra
- Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei by J. Kormandy at the Univ. Texas, Austin.
- A nice history of the Hubble Constant by John P. Huchra at the CfA.
- NED - the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database.
Term Paper Information
Term papers should be in depth and detailed, not an overview of a topic. It should be as specific as possible. Use equations and figures as necessary. It should be at the graduate-level, not at the Astr 101-level.
Papers must be written in LaTeX using the ApJ Letters format, with a maximum length of 4 pages (including everything except figures).
Some ideas for topics and additional information for the term paper.
Here are explicit instructions on how the Term Paper should be written and also on how it will be evaluated:
"paper-criteria.pdf"
Late Term Paper Policy:
1/3 letter grade deducted per day late.
Maximum penalty is 1-1/3 letter grades, which applies to all papers submitted 4 or more days late.