Astronomy 123: Stars
Books
Our primary textbook is An Introduction to Modern Stellar Astrophysics by B. Carroll and D. Ostlie, 2nd ed. (ISBN: 0805303480); it is available in the College bookstore. There is also a copy on the honors reserve shelf in Cornell.
This is the only book that you are required to have. However...
...we will be using several other resources; mostly other textbooks. But also an article or two. As they are assigned, they will be listed here (and put on the reserve shelf, in a binder).
Books:
- Frank Shu, "The Physical Universe" - a quirky, and now getting-to-be-pretty-old textbook. Ostensibly an introductory textbook, but in places, at least, it reads like a relatively advanced book. Shu has a good perspective on many basic aspects of stellar astrophysics. Worth a read, but not the only book you'd want to use.
- Erica Bohm-Vitense, "Introduction to Stellar Astrophysics" - a nice, basic graduate level text. Has three volumes; all of them are on the reserve shelf.
- Donald Clayton, "Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis" - advanced, hard-core details and derivations; covers many more topics - in depth - than its title would seem to imply.
- Arthur Cox, "Allen's Astrophysical Quantities" - lots of tables and brief explanations of fundamental stellar parameters (theoretical/physical, as well as observable).
- Richard Bowers & Terry Deeming, "Astrophysics, I" - dry and in-depth.
- Henny Lamers & Joe Cassinelli, "An Introduction to Stellar Winds" - we'll use this later in the semester, when we discuss stellar winds.
- Rybicki & Lightman, "Radiative Processes in Astrophysics" - like "Snakes on a Plane," the title says it all.
Papers, articles:
- Marcy & Butler, 2000, "Planets Orbiting Other Suns," PASP, 112, 137 (week 2)
- Figer, 2005, "An Upper Limit to the Masses of Stars," Nature, 434, 192 [read the supplemental article, too] (week 5)
- Krumholz, et al., 2009, "The Formation of Massive Star Systems by Accretion," Science, 323, 754 [read the supplemental article and watch the movie, too] (week 5)
- Whitney, 2009, "Perspectives: Forming Massive Stars," Science, 323, 719 (week 5) [This is commentary on the Krumholz et al. article]
- Stancliffe, et al., 2009, "Why do low-mass stars become red giants," astro-ph, 0902.0406v1 (week 11)
- Owocki, "Radiatively Driven Stellar Winds from Hot Stars," in The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, CRC Press, 2000.
Finally, the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics will be very useful resource for you. It has relatively high-level articles on many, many subtopics related to stars. Don't hesitate to look things up in there as the need arises. The encyclopedia is in the reference section of Cornell, only a few meters from our class reserve shelf. And the electronic version is linked from our class page.
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This page is maintained by David
Cohen
dcohen1 -at- swarthmore -dot- edu
Last modified: April 25, 2009