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AST 403: Galaxies and Intergalactic Medium

A 3-credit course offered as part of the Minor in Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A), and also available as an elective for students pursuing a major in Physics.

This course is part of the Data-Intensive Astronomy (DIA) track of A&A Minor. The necessary mathematics and physics are introduced from the ground up, ensuring accessibility for students from diverse backgrounds, including physical sciences, electrical engineering, and computer science.

Prerequisite: MAT 104.

Course Content

Milky Way

How did our galaxy form? What are the constituent components of our Galaxy? Galactic rotation. Meteorology of interstellar gas.

Galaxy Types

How did Hubble create the first classification scheme for galaxies? How has this scheme been modified to match with modern observations? What physical processes create the different types?

Birth and Evolution

How did galaxies form within the first 3 billion years of our universe? What is the contribution of dark matter and gaseous halos in the formation? How do galaxies evolve?

Galaxy Clusters

When did the first clusters of galaxies emerge? How different are the radio, visible-light and x-ray observations of galaxy clusters?

Active Galaxies

How does the supermassive black hole at the center and the galaxy as a whole co-evolve over the lifetime of a galaxy? Radio observations of active galactic nuclei.

Intergalactic Medium

Composition of the intergalactic medium and the variation of its density. Spectra lines originating from the IGM.

Keystone Project

Detecting shock and cold fronts in the intergalactic medium of galaxy clusters using Python.

Textbooks

  1. L. S. Sparke & J. S. Gallagher, III, Galaxies in the Universe: An Introduction, Cambridge University
  2. Press, 2007.
  3. H. Mo, F. van den Bosch & S. White, Galaxy Formation and Evolution, Cambridge University Press,
    2010.
  4. Peter Schneider, Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology: An Introduction, Springer, 2006.
AST 402: Stars and Interstellar MediumAST 410: Radio Astronomy