University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Astronomy 250: Introduction to Cosmology
Spring 1999

``It's been a long strange trip for this universe we call home ...."

General Info

Spring `99: ASTR 250. Introduction to Cosmology

PREREQUISITE: ASTR 100, OR ASTR 121, OR ASTR 122, OR ASTR 210; OR CONSENT OF INSTRUCTOR.
3 HOURS. 
     00862 LECT  1      1        MWF      112 TRANS BLD       WHITE

Announcements

The final exam will take place on Monday, May 10th from 1:30-4:30pm in the same room as the lectures have been held.

Who's Who

Instructor:Martin White, Astronomy 206
TA:Daniel Gosha, Astronomy 132
(244-5469)

What's What

Lectures:Mon/Wed/Fri, 1-2pm
Office hours: Instructor: Wed 2-3pm
TA: Tue 1-2pm and Fri 2-3pm
Grade: problem sets (20%)
midterm (20%)
term paper (20%)
final (40%)
Text:Silk, A Short History of the Universe

Goals

Most generally, I want students to have fun and learn about the exciting and ongoing revolution in our understanding of the universe.

Schedule

  1. Goals and outline of the course
  2. What is cosmology?
    1. A brief history of cosmological thought
    2. The scientific method and a way to proceed
    3. A quick tour of the universe
      1. Cosmological scales and scientific notation
      2. A cosmic inventory
  3. The nature of space and time
    1. Infinite space and absolute time
    2. Special relativity
    3. General relativity
  4. Models of the expanding universe
    1. The universe is expanding
    2. The universe has a past
    3. ... and a future
  5. The Hot Big Bang model
    1. A brief history of the universe
    2. The origin of the elements: nuclear interactions and predictions
    3. The afterglow of creation: a cosmic rosetta stone?
  6. Before the Big Bang
    1. A special place: inflation, smoothness and flatness
  7. Dark matter and dark energy
    1. What you see is not what you get -- the need for dark matter.
    2. It's not star stuff: exotic particles as the dark matter
    3. Exotic objects as the hidden mass
  8. From chaos to order using instability and uncertainty
    1. The link between the very large and the very small
    2. If it isn't dark, it doesn't matter.
    3. When does my favorite object form?
    4. Computing the universe
    5. Where are most of the baryons?
  9. Frontiers of cosmology
    1. The big questions and our clues

Assignments

Will be posted in due course.

Projects

By April 9th each student will need to hand in a (roughly) 5 page paper on one of the topics listed below. People often learn best by explaining a concept to another, so the point of this project is for you to learn about a particular subject in cosmology and then attempt to explain it in a term paper.

When writing the paper you should try to address the following points:

  1. What physical phenomenon is being discussed (e.g. galaxies recede)?
  2. What are we trying to learn (e.g. rate of expansion of the universe)?
  3. What is the current status of the field (e.g. expansion rate is about 65km/s/Mpc)?
  4. What are the future prospects (e.g. a few per cent measurement)?

Below is a list of projects, plus some references to help you get started in learning more about them. You are encouraged to search more widely than just the sources given below. You might find more information at this link, or this link, using your favourite Web search engine or (gasp!) using the library. Remember that Padmanabhan's book After the first 3 minutes and Rees' book Before the beginning contain a lot of useful information.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy
Physics Today, November 1997, 32
General Relativity and Gravitation, 27, 1023 (1995) [an essay, honest!]
Science News, Feb 28, 1998, p. 139
Clusters of galaxies
Scientific American, December 1998, p. 52
Various web resources linked from here.
The Hubble Constant
Almost any textbook and
Scientific American, special issue.
High redshift supernovae and an accelerating universal expansion (Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year)
(see the news stories here)
Science, 18 Dec 1998, cover story
Scientific American, January 1999, p. 47 and p. 53
Science News, 154, (October. 31), p. 277
The High-Z supernova search team home page, and links therefrom.
The SNCP home page
Gravitational Lensing
Joanne Cohn's web based introduction with numerous links to other articles.
An Einstein Ring discovered.
The Ly-a forest
Sky and Telescope, September 1997, p. 28
Padmanabhan, pp. 179-185.
Machos and Planets
The PLANET home page
and in particular Penny Sackett's microlensing tutorial.
See also the links under Gravitational lensing.

If you would like to do a project on a topic that is NOT listed above, please see me first. Some examples of projects which are slightly out of the main stream of cosmological research are listed below:

  1. The Shape of the Universe (Topology)
    Science News, Feb 21, 1998 (also online here)
  2. The Fate of the Universe
    Science News, Jan 3, 1998 (also online here)
    New York Times, July 14, 1998, p. B9 (essay by Malcom Browne)
    Sky & Telescope, 96, 1998, p. 32
    Life, The Universe, and Nothing (advanced and very speculative)

Web Links

 A tutorial on special relativity with some nice illustrations of length contraction, time dilation and simultaneity can be found on Andrew Hamilton's special relativity pages. Also, Joanne Cohn has produced a short set of notes on special relativity. Jason Hinson has produced a FAQ on space-time diagrams, special relativity and faster than light travel which you may find useful.

A discussion of, and a Java applet illustrating, the twin paradox can be found on Rob Salgado's Light Cone pages. Even more information can be accessed through Chris Hillman's "relativity pages on the web".

During this course we will occasionally make use of some basic calculus. For those students who have not learned calculus, I have written a brief introduction to all of the ideas we will need for this course. You do not need to memorize these notes, all of the formulae you will need will be given to you.

You can find the predictions of element abundances vs the baryon density from this BBN Java calculator at U Washington.

There are many, many Web resources on dark matter. A nice place to start is Jon Dursi's tutorial, which has several nice Java experiments you can run. Also, you can find more information at this URL.

The web is full of movies and animations illustrating large-scale structure. You can find a general introduction to the main ideas at this URL. Some animations of the formation of large-scale structure, from the same group as made the movie shown in class, can be found here or by a different group at this URL or this URL or this URL. An MPEG fly-by of the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS) can be found at this URL. There are numerous animations of the formation of clusters of galaxies, at the intersection of filaments, on the world wide web. Some examples are here, here, here, here and here.

Some relevant links

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