It is designed mainly for upper-division astronomy majors, but it is also suitable for students majoring in closely related fields such as physics or engineering. Astronomy draws on such a wide variety of areas in physics that we cannot expect you to have prior preparation in all of them, and will introduce physical ideas and laws as needed. We will try to avoid excessive redundancy, but that is inevitable in some subject areas, since not all members of the present class will have taken these other courses. Instead, I will put various texts on reserve in the Peridier library, and I will recommend readings from them. In addition, my class notes will be placed on reserve in both the Peridier and PMA libraries.
Students generally benefit from the experience of researching a specific topic in some depth.
Your presentation will be an oral explanation of a poster on the subject that you have prepared for the occasion. Your grade will be determined from a combination of astronomical content, presentation style and effort, and the quality of the poster that accompanies your presentation. You will individually prepare and give this small talk on some narrow stellar astronomy topic, but in the context of a broader topic to be addressed by a group of students. There will be three or four broad areas drawn from the latter topics in the preliminary syllabus given below, each of which will be assigned to a group of three to five students. I regard this course as a vital link between the basic, often elegant physics and mathematics that you have ingested at UT for the past two-three years, and the real, often messy world of astronomical research.