ASTROPHYSICS  205 
Syllabus, Lecture Notes & Texts


 
 

Instructors: David Spergel, Ed Turner, and Jill Knapp
 
 

    Syllabus with Lecture Notes


For a copy of this syllabus in plain text click here:  Syllabus


Mon Sep 15:       1. Introduction. Survey of the Solar System   PS file    or  PDF file

Wed Sep 17:       2. Gravity, Kepler's Laws, Orbits  PS file   or  PDF file

Mon Sep 22:       3. Stellar Properties: mass, luminosity, temperature  PS file   or  PDF file

Wed Sep 24:       4. Main sequence evolution and stellar lifetimes   PS file   or   PDF file

Mon Sep 29:       5. Planetary Temperatures   PS file   or   PDF file

Wed Oct 1:       6. Spectroscopy: theory, telescopes, spectrographs    PS file    or   PDF file

Mon Oct 6:       7. Radial Velocity Surveys    PS file    or   PDF file

Wed Oct 8:       8. Astrometry     PS file    or   PDF file

Reading for Lectures 1-8     text file

Mon Oct 13:       9. Gravitational microlensing  PS file     or   PDF file

Wed Oct 15:     10. Occultations: First look at Planetary Atmospheres
                            PDF file   or  PS file

Mon Oct 20:     11. Coronography PS file     or   PDF file

Wed Oct 22:     Midterm

    MIDTERM-BREAK

Mon Nov 3:    13. From the Big Bang to the Beginning of the Solar System PS file   or  PDF file
 
Wed Nov 5:    14. The formation of the Solar System;   PS file    or  PDF file

Mon Nov 10:       15. Earth and Earthlike Planets   PS file    or  PDF file

Wed Nov 12:       16. Pulsar Planets     HTML file    or    PDF file

Mon Nov 17:       17. The Biochemical Basis of Life: Nucleic Acids and Proteins    PS file    or   PDF file

Wed Nov 19:          18. Microbes and the Origin of Life    PS file   or   PDF file

Mon Nov 24:       19. Possible extraterrestrial biology in the Solar System   PS file  or  PDF file

Wed Nov 26:     20. The evolution of advanced/multicellular organisms   PS file  or  PDF file

Mon Dec 1:       21. Cosmic, Geological and Human Timescales   PS file   or  PDF file

Wed Dec 3 :    22. Remote Sensing of spectroscopic and photometric biomarkers  PS file   or  PDF file

Mon Dec 8:     23. SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence   PS file   or  PDF file

Wed Dec 10:      24. Scientific Speculations on Extraterrestrial Life   PS file   or  PDF file
 
 
  Textbooks:
 

The Search for Life in the Universe, by D. Goldsmith and T. Owen (GO),
  3rd Edition, University Science Books

Rare Earth: why complex life is uncommon in the Universe, by D. Brownlee and P. Ward,
  Copernicus Books

Life Everywhere: the maverick science of astrobiology, by D. Darling,
  Basic Books

Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics, by M. Zeilik, S. Gregory and E. Smith (ZGS)
  International Thompson Publishing

The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, by Frank H. Shu,
  University Science Books (Shu)

Intelligent Life in The Universe, by H. Ulmschneider,
  Springer-Verlag

The Origin and Evolution of the Universe, eds. B. Zuckerman and M.A. Malkan,
  Jones & Bartlett (ZM)

An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, by B.W. Carroll and D.A. Ostlie,
  Addison-Wesley (CO)

The five ages of the Universe: inside the physics of eternity, by F. Adams and G. Laughlin,
  The Free Press

Universe, by W. Kaufmann and R. Freedman,
  W.H. Freeman Co.

The Universe, Revealed, by C. Impey and W.K. Hartmann,
  Brooks-Cole-Thomson
 
 
 

We will place class notes, problem sets etc. on the web site.  The class text will be Goldsmith and Owen (GO). This book covers much of the course material except for the mathematical aspects. Some of these is covered in the Zeilik et al. book, but there is not a satisfactory edition of this book. Copies will be placed in the library and much of the mathematical material will appear in the course notes. Note that there are several editions of Zeilik et al. with different permutations of authors. For those who wish to purchase a more technical book, we'd recommend Carroll and Ostlie (Shu is excellent but is a very old text), although the level is more advanced. In general, Zeilik et al. and Carroll and Ostlie are recommended, not required.

 
 
The "Rare Earths" and "Life abounding" books will be discussed in the precepts. We will attempt to understand why two quite well-reasoned books can come to such different conclusions. The remaining books listed will be on reserve also (in the Peyton, Firestone and Jadwin libraries) as additional/supplemental reading. You should purchase the first three books for the course.

 
 
The topic of this course is the discovery of planets orbiting other stars. The questions of the existence of other planets and of life on those planets have been with us since the dawn of time. Since the realization that not only the Earth but the other planets of our Solar System orbit the Sun and that life on Earth depends on sunlight, we have searched for more planets in our own solar system, and for planets orbiting other stars. In the last ten years these searches have finally succeeded, and the search for, and study of, other planetary systems is a major theme of current astrophysics, including that done at Princeton. In this course, we want to introduce you to this work; to investigate how difficult the search for planets is and why it finally succeeded, as well as do an overview of cosmology and star formation, to see how stars "work" and why we expected that planets around other stars would be common.