Lecture Notes

The lecture notes were taken in the Fall of 2001 by Jeremy Schnittman, who as a student in the subject, agreed to take notes and to format them using LaTeX. He used Professor Paul Schechter's handwritten notes in producing them. The figures were produced by Caitlin Millard during June-August 2004. Used with permission. As of the date of publication, only lecture notes for sessions 1 through 11 were available.

SES # TOPICS LECTURE NOTES
L1 Introduction: What is a Galaxy? (PDF)
L2 How Do You Build a Galaxy? (PDF)
L3 How are Galaxies Described? (PDF)
L4 Gravitational Potentials: General Results (PDF)
L5 Interesting and Special Cases (PDF)
L6 Orbits in Spherical Potentials and Integrals (PDF)
L7 Orbits in Axisymmetric Potentials

Epicyclic Approximation
(PDF)
L8 Equilibria of Stellar Systems

Boltzmann Equation
(PDF)

(PDF)
L9 Jeans' Equations in Spherical Coordinates (PDF)
L10 Jeans' Equations Applied

Jeans' Theorem
(PDF)
L11 Stability: Jeans Mass and Spiral Structure (PDF)
L12 Gravitational Mirages (aka lenses) via Fermat's Principle  
L13 Applied Gravitational Lensing  
L14 Weak Lensing  
L15 Clusters of Galaxies  
L16 Physics in Clusters of Galaxies  
L17 The Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect  
L18 Cosmology: Recent History and a Serviceable Newtonian Model  
L19 The Spherical Model  
L20 Recombination  
L21 From Fields to Objects: The Press-Schecter Recipe  
L22 Adding GR to Cosmology  
L23 Distances in Cosmology  
L24 Cosmological Parameters  
L25 Growing Modes in Expanding Universes: Jeans Redux  
L26 Growing Modes: Radiation Dominated and Non-baryonic Universes  
L27 Statistical Measures of Cosmic Structure  
L28 The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Fluctuations  
L29 Cosmological Helium Production  
L30 Details of Helium Production  
L31 Absorbers along Quasar Lines of Sight  
L32 Active Galactic Nuclei  
L33 The Black Hole Paradigm for AGN  
L34 Accretion Disks  
L35 Superluminality and Jets  
L36 Extragalactic Sky Brightness: Present and Past Superposed  
L37 Bonus Lecture #1  
L38 Bonus Lecture #2