Astronomy 505 - Fall 2008
These lecture notes provide an overview of the material covered and
supplementary comments that may be useful. They
complement any notes handed out in class and provide more descriptive
material and some links to relevant figures.
Chapter 1 and 2 Carroll/Ostlie
I covered most of Chapter 1 and 2 Ostlie in the first few lectures. I
handed out relevant web page notes from Nicole Vogt's version of this
course related to her section on Celestial Mechanics. Note that what I
handed out is not exactly the same as all the web pages she has devoted
to this. You can find all of these pages by going to this link:
Link
to Nicole's course schedule with links to the section on celestial
mechanics.
I also wrote some handwritten notes largely based on the textbook but
with some discussion added. The handwritten notes were distributed to
the students.
Chapter 7 and 17 Ostlie
Before covering radiation from stars, we stay on the focus of dynamics
and gravity, and chapter 7 discusses binary stars. Only some
supplementary notes to the textbook were discussed in class, before
going into the subject of 3-body problem and Lagrange points, and
simple examples of extended mass distributions. We briefly discussed
close binary stars, mass transfer and the types of binaries as part of
the discussion on Lagrange points.
Galaxies: we discussed rotation curves for spherical mass
distributions, the potential, escape velocity and information on dark
matter. I don't think this is covered much in the text book.