Syllabus. Regular office hour is Thu 1 PM.
Lecture materials:
Lecture 1 slides: galaxy phenomenology
Slides on results from CDM simulations (including NFW), galaxy formation modeling techniques
Lecture notes on N-body methods, including orbit integration and computational hydrodynamics
Slides on dark matter cusp-core problem
Slides on mass-velocity anisotropy degeneracy
Slides on disk/spiral structure phenomenology
Slides on Toomre instability, swing amplification, dynamical friction, galaxy mergers, and AGN
Peter Young’s notes on leapfrog and other symplectic algorithms
An interactive Barnes-Hut tree
Paper on energy-conserving adaptive gravitational softening: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007MNRAS.374.1347P
Paper on softening as a smoothing operation: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012MNRAS.425.1104B
GADGET-2 (TreePM) code paper (including section 5 on parallelization strategies): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005MNRAS.364.1105S
Code paper for the moving-mesh hydro code Arepo: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010MNRAS.401..791S
GIZMO code paper, describing new Godunov-based meshless methods (also contains a useful summary of other hydro algorithms): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1409.7395H
Our treatment of the Boltzmann and Jeans equations will closely follow Paul Schechter’s lecture notes, available at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-902-astrophysics-ii-fall-2004/lecture-notes
Problem sets:
Problem set 1, due Jan. 17.
Problem set 2, due Jan. 31.
Problem set 3, due Feb. 14.
Problem set 4, due Feb. 23.
Problem set 5, due Mar. 2.
Final
Download here. You have 48 hours to complete the final from the time you start it. Due by end of day on Wednesday, March 8 (send solutions as soon as you are done).