Astronomy 125: Stars in the Interstellar Medium
Archive of Announcements
Week 14
posted 4/24
It's the last week of classes!
Week 13
posted 4/18
Peter Weck is giving his thesis talk on Friday at lunchtime.
Week 12
posted 4/10
We have our last round of comps talks on Wednesday, right after seminar. Also, we have a colloquium this week, by Stephon Alexander, from Dartmouth, who'll be talking about cosmology, relativity, and matter-anitmatter asymmetry. It's at 4:30 on Friday. It would be great to see you all there.
Week 11
posted 4/2
We have some senior comps talks this Wednesday (right after seminar) and Friday. Come to them and support your classmates.
Week 10
posted 3/27
No colloquia this week. But April fools day, so...be careful.
Week 9
posted 3/22
We are moving from stars into the ISM, via star formation.
Also – two job candidate talks this week: Wednesday at 4:30 (right after seminar) and Friday at 12:30. Please come!
Week 8
The week after returning from break, we had our midterm in class. There was no assignment this week.
Week 7
posted 2/28
This is our last week of stars. Next week is spring break. The following week we'll have our midterm, in class.
Week 6
posted 2/21
The Sun this week. Textbook plus a paper.
Week 5
posted 2/16
Finishing up stellar interiors and then on to post-main sequence stellar evolution.
Week 4
posted 2/8
This week we're doing stellar interiors.
If you want to follow-up on both our sunspot and limb-darkening observing at break last Wednesday, and on Robert Wicks's colloquium, you can see the (near?) realtime Sun in various wavelengths. I think the sunspots we saw are still visible. And you can see the correlation between their positions and the high magnetic field and the bright EUV/X-ray emitting plasma.
There's an open house for the public at the telescope this Tuesday from 8 to 9 pm. Feel free to drop by if you'd like to look through the telescope. We'll look at Jupiter and the Orion Nebula, among other things. Feel free to invite friends.
Week 3
posted 1/31
This week we're continuing radiation transport and stellar atmospheres.
You should come to the colloquium this Friday at lunchtime. It's on the solar wind.
Week 2
We're diving into radiation transport and stellar atmospheres this week.
Week 1
Our first seminar meeting is on Wednesday, at 1:15. Please be there promptly and ready to start, with presentation handouts for each of your classmates. A reading assignment and presentation guidelines for this week are now posted. Note that you must choose a topic and sign up for a meeting with me on Tuesday (a link to a Google doc was sent to you).
David will bring the snack to seminar the first week. A snack schedule for the rest of the seminar will be posted here soon.
Week 0
posted 11/24
This is in some sense the most fundamental astronomy seminar. The understanding of stars is the basis of nearly all of modern astrophysics – and much of modern physics too. In many ways it is the most mature and best-understood branch of astrophysics. And many important fundamental aspects of physics are brought to bear on stellar astrophysics, including gravity, radiation transport, spectroscopy, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and the list goes on. Stars are born in the interstellar medium (ISM) and their violent deaths, especially for massive stars that end their lives as supernovae, have a profound influence on the interstellar medium. So it is natural to study the two subjects together. And the study of the ISM also involves a lot of useful and fundamental physics.
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This page is maintained by David Cohen
cohen -at- astro.swarthmore.edu
Last modified: May 9, 2015