Professor
Chris Sneden
Office: RLM 15.310A
(enter 15.310)
Hours: MWF 2-3
Phone: (512) 471-1349
chris@verdi.as.
utexas.edu
Course Website
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Text:
None!
Recommended: D. F. Gray, The Observation and Analysis of Stellar Photospheres
Suggested: G. W. Collins, The Fundamentals of Stellar Astrophysics
Suggested: W. K. Rose, Advanced Stellar Astrophysics
Suggested: C. R. Cowley, The Theory of Stellar Spectra
Grading:
Out-of-class assignments 60% of grade
Hour tests (2 of them) 40%
Subject Matter, Goals, and Miscellaneous Comments
Astronomy 383C is a graduate-level course on stellar atmospheres. The official course description is broad:
"Observational properties of stellar atmospheres; theoretical calculations of stellar atmospheres and stellar spectra."
The prerequisites for AST 383C are graduate standing and consent of instructor. I will assume that you have had AST 380E
Radiative Processes and Radiative Transfer, so that we can plunge into the stellar atmospheres material pretty
quickly.
My bias in this course? I regard AST 383C as one link between the basic, often elegant physics that you have ingested,
and the real, often messy world of stellar astronomical research. The assignments will not tax your mathematical abilities.
I am not an astrophysicist as the term is usually meant (that is, I am not a theorist). I am an observational astronomer, and
proud of it. Thus the stellar atmospheres work in this course will have a strong observational bias to it. This can be seen
in the suggested books, which do not include (as a prominent example) the very theoretical Stellar Atmospheres, 2nd
Edition by Mihalas. It can also be understood by some of the assignments to be worked on: investigations of photometric
systems, derivation of the chemical compositions of stars, the computations of model stellar atmospheres, etc. Since
this is my first time to teach this course, I am unsure of the pacing, and the topics to be covered are therefore not assigned
time-lines in the list below.
Preliminary Wimpy Course Outline (subject to revision)
- Reminders of Basic Quantities of Radiation: intensity, flux, blackbodies
- Overview of Large-Scale Observational Properties of Stars: luminosity, effective temperature, color indices,
"classification" spectroscopy, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, stellar masses
- Radiative transfer as applied to stellar atmospheres
- Basic principles of model atmosphere construction
- Photospheric spectral line formation
- Chemical composition analysis
- Stellar winds; mass loss
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