Università Roma Tre

Topics Part A

• Coordinates and Telescopes
• Elements of Spectroscopy
• Stars and Stellar Evolution • Galaxies
• Active Galactic Nuclei


Program Part A

• Overview

• Celestial coordinates (1.3)

• Telescopes and resolving power (6.1)

• Parallax distance (3.1)

• Flux, brightness, apparent and absolute magnitudes, colors (3.2, 3.3, 3.6)

• The black body (3.4, 3.5)

• Hertzsprung-Russel diagram (8.2)

• Open and globular clusters: position, stellar populations and HR diagram (13.3)

• White dwarfs, Novae and SuperNovae (notes and partly in 15 and 16)

• The classification of galaxies (24.1)

• The rotation curve of galaxies and dark matter (25.3)

• The center of the Galaxy and its Black Hole (25.4)

• Hubble's law and expansion of the Universe (27.2)

• Probability of collision between stars and galaxies (handouts)

• Black Holes: outline of General Relativity (outline 17)

• Active Galactic Nuclei (28.1, 28.2, 28.3)


Topics Part B

• Structure and stellar evolution
• Elements of Spectroscopy
• Distances and expansion of the Universe • Galaxies
• GRB and gravitational waves

Program Part B

• Acretion disks and X-ray emission in Active Galactic Nuclei (28.2)

• Stars of Neutrons and Pulsars (16.6, 16.7)

• Gamma Ray Bursts (handouts)

• Gravitational Waves (lecture notes)

• Spectroscopy: eq. Boltzmann-excitation and Saha-ionization (8.1)

• Spectroscopy: speed, temperature and density measurements (handouts)

• Eq. of star structure, time and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (11.1-4)

• Nuclear reactions of hydrogen (11.3)

• Jeans mass of gravitational collapse, free-fall time and Initial Mass Function (12.2, 12.3)

• The Milky Way and the local group (25.1, 25.2)

• Metallicity (25.2)

• Transit of Venus and measurement of the Earth-Sun distance (handouts)

• Distance scale (27.1)

• Hubble's law and expansion of the Universe (27.2)

• Local Group, Clusters of Galaxies, large scale structure of the Universe (27.3)

• The Big Bang and the background radiation (29.2 brief notes and lecture notes)

A copy of the lecture notes can be downloaded from the course website.

In brackets, the paragraphs from “An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, II ed. - B.W. Carrol, D.A. Ostlie - Ed. Pearson, Addison Wesley ”(copies available in the library). The discussion in the course has been simplified compared to what is reported in the text. Alternative text in Italian: Attilio Ferrari, Stars, Galaxies, Universe - Fundamentals of Astrophysics - Ed. Springer