justintc217 / a425_2016

Cosmology (A425)

Astronomy 425: Cosmology (Fall 2016)

Class will be held Mondays and Wednesday in the Physics and Astronomy Auditorium (PAA A210) from 2.00pm to 3.20pm. Notes and material is available at http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/ajc/teaching/a425

Class and Office hours

The grade will be broken down as:

• Mid term 25%, Final 50%, Homework 25%
• Midterm will be on Wednesday November 2nd 2016
• Final will be Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 230-420 pm, PAA A210

Office hours are on a drop in basis and by appointment. My office is in the Physics and Astronomy building (B355). If the door is open feel free to drop in, or send me an email to arrange a time.

Goals and Objectives

This is a self-contained course designed to introduce students to the basics of cosmology. The course has a significant mathematical content, principally geometry, algebra and calculus. The topics we will cover include: the cosmological principle, expansion of the universe, the Robertson-Walker metric, dynamics of an expanding universe, observational constraints on the expansion of the universe, the role of dark matter and dark energy, the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, inflation, new probes of cosmology.

By the end of this class you should expect to be able to:

• Explain the physical principles that describe the expansion of the universe
• Calculate distance, volume and age of the universe as a function of redshift for a range of different cosmological models
• Measure the scales on which structures collapse due to gravity and how this depends on the nature of the dark matter.
• Characterize the observational probes of cosmology and how they can be used to measure the properties of dark matter and dark energy

Text Book

There are a number of useful textbooks that you can draw information from. We will be using: “Introduction to Cosmology: Barbara Ryden (Pearson Addison-Wesley)

How to update a fork

If you have a fork of this repository and you want to update that fork to have it synchronized with the original repository there are two steps (this must be done at the level of the cloned repo you cant do this using the Github interface):

• First you configure a clone of a fork so you can update to the upstream/master (you do this once per repo)
  • https://help.github.com/articles/configuring-a-remote-for-a-fork/
• Every time you want to update to the lastest version you
  • https://help.github.com/articles/syncing-a-fork/