Galaxies Block Course
Galaxies Block Course : 23-30 March 2009
ARI Seminarraum
Eric Bell and Hans-Walter Rix, with guest lectures by Knud Jahnke and Nicolas Martin
This lecture course is the compact equivalent of the semester-long course
on galaxies that is an established part of the Astronomy/Physics graduate
curriculum. The course will convey a broad and up-to-date perspective on
the current state of knowledge and on the physical principles that shape
the properties and evolution of the galaxy population, both at the present
epoch and at high redshift. While the cosmological context will be
stressed throughout, this class is not a cosmology course, nor have its
main focus on modeling galaxy formation. Emphasis will be given to
viewing galaxies as 'baryon condensates' in the cosmic dark matter web, to
recent quantitative approaches for characterizing galaxy properties; there
will be a focus on the Milky Way and the Local Group - to understand
galaxies, when resolved into individual stars; on galaxy dynamics, the
role of dark matter in galaxy formation and on black holes at galaxy
centers; on the various phases of gas and dust in galaxies. To prepare
students for research, the lectures will also discuss the most
actively-pursued open questions in the field.
Prerequisites: Introduction to Astronomy 1 and 2 (or equivalent); basic
knowledge of cosmology.
There will be two afternoons of discussion of a practical exercise
assigned to the students (on the website) in addition to discussion of
unclear points from the lectures; Monday 30th takes the form of
student-led short presentations on some open questions presented on the
website.
- Monday 23 March
- Tuesday 24 March
- Wednesday 25 March
- 9:00 - 10:30 Discussion of the Luminosity function exercise below and discussion session
- 11:00 - 12:30 Supermassive black holes, AGN, and AGN feedback - powerpoint (old version)
- 2:00 - 3:30 Galaxy formation on a postcard - Cooling, star formation and feedback - powerpoint or pdf
- Thursday 26 March
- 9:00 - 10:30 Galaxy Merging and Environment - powerpoint or pdf
- 11:00 - 12:30 Galaxy structures and scaling relations - powerpoint or pdf
- 2:00 - 3:30 Discussion of the Luminosity function exercise below and discussion session
- Friday 27 March
- 9:00 - 10:30 Galaxy evolution - powerpoint or pdf
- 11:00 - 12:30 The Local Group as a cosmological testbed -
powerpoint or pdf (old version)
- Monday 30 March
- 9:00 - 1:00 Discussion session
Student groups give short presentations on one of the following (or similar) questions (20 minute presentation, 20 minute discussion)
- If there were dark matter halos without galaxies in them, how could
you go about finding out?
- Massive galaxies are red, massive galaxies are in dense environments.
How
could one tackle the problem of best finding out what is 'driving this
correlation?
- In simulations of merger --> obscured star-burst --> optically bright
QSO
phase, this is the time ordering. How would you go about figuring out
whether nature obeys this time order?
- If you had the, say, Andromeda galaxy perfectly resolved into stars
(to
make CMDs) etc, what (broadly) interesting questions would you ask of the
data?
- How would you go about estimating the ratio of 'dry' mergers (mergers
with no new stars), vs. 'wet' mergers (i.e. mergers that go along with
possibly obscured, IR-bright star-bursts)?
- How would you go about running an ab-initio (dark matter) simulation
that
actually resembles our Local Group (Milky Way, M31, M33, etc...)?
- How could you go about finding out whether spiral arms or bars are
long-lived phenomena (would retain their 'shape' for longer than t_dyn)?
- If (some) galaxies contained not yet merged binary black holes, how
could
you tell? (What should their orbital velocities be?)
This example dataset has 5 columns: redshift, apparent magnitude in g-band, apparent magnitude in r-band, Sersic n value (1 = exponential disk, 4 = de Vaucouleurs), and half-light radius of the Sersic fit (in arcseconds). SDSS is limited to have spectra for gals with 14.5
Make a histogram of absolute magnitudes or stellar masses (see below); why is this only distantly related to the luminosity function?
Construct a luminosity function (in shells, if you really want using V_max). Why can't you work out the vertical normalisation (in gals per cubic Mpc)?
Construct a stellar mass function using a simple color-dependent stellar M/L : assume log M/L = -0.406 + 1.097(g-r) [suitable for a Chabrier IMF], and an absolute magnitude of the Sun of 4.67 (see also Lecture 6).
Look at distribution of color vs. mass, size vs. mass, and size vs. n - in this case, does your answer depend on volume correction?
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bell@mpia.de
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©2009 Eric Bell. Last modified 26th March 2009.
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