Materials related to AST1420 at the University of Toronto --- Galactic Structure and Dynamics

• Logistics
• Assignments
• Lecture notes
• Additional reading
• Lecture slides
• Code

• Meeting time / room: Fridays 11am - 1pm / AB 113

• Instructor: Jo Bovy, AB229

• Email: jo - dot - bovy - at - utoronto - dot - ca

• Syllabus: Full details can be found in the syllabus

• Assignment 1: Available here, due Oct. 6 at the start of class

• Assignment 2: Available here, due Oct. 27 at the start of class

• Assignment 3: Available here, due Nov. 17 at the start of class

• Week 1: Introduction

• Week 2: Spherical mass distributions

• Week 3: Equilibria of spherical, collisionless stellar systems

• Week 4: Masses of spherical stellar systems

• Week 5: Disk mass distributions

• Week 6: The kinematics and dynamics of galactic rotation

• Week 7: Equilibria of galactic disks

• Week 8: Mildly flattened and triaxial mass distributions

• Week 9: Numerical methods

• Week 1: BM98 Chapter 1 for general background, BM98 Chapter 2 for review of astronomical measurements.

• Week 2: BT08 Sec 2.1 and 2.2 (mostly covered in notes). BT08 Appendix D (classical mechanics).

• Week 3: BT08 Sec 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.8 (almost entirely covered in notes).

• Week 4: Wolf et al. (2010), van Dokkum et al. (2016), Walker & Penarrubia (2011).

• Week 5: BT08 Sec. 2.3 (mostly covered in notes), 2.6 (alternative approach to that in the notes), 3.2 (mostly covered in notes).

• Week 6: BM98 Sec. 8.2, Sec. 9.1, 9.2, BT08 end of Sec. 3.2; Bovy 2017.

• Week 7: BT08 Sec. 4.4, 4.5, 4.8 (pp. 353--356), 4.9.3.

• Week 8: BT08 Sec. 2.4, 2.5, 3.2.2, 3.3, 3.7.3, 3.8.

• Week 9: BT08 Sec. 2.9, 3.4; Dehnen & Read (2011).

Here, the books referenced are

• BT08: Binney & Tremaine, Galactic Dynamics, 2nd Edition, 2008, Princeton University Press. See this link for errata.

• BM98: Binney & Merrifield, Galactic Astronomy, 1998, Princeton University Press. See this link for errata.

• Week 1: slides for week 1

• Week 2: slides for week 2

• Week 3: slides for week 3

• Week 4: slides for week 4

• Week 5: slides for week 5

• Week 6: slides for week 6

• Week 7: slides for week 7

• Week 8: slides for week 8

• Week 9: slides for week 9

The notes include code snippets, some of which require functions from the galdyncourse_util Python package developed to accompany the notes. You can download the latest version of this package here. Untar.gz this package using

tar xvzf galdyncourse_util-0.2.tar.gz

which creates the directory galdyncourse_util-0.2. Enter this directory. Installing the package and other required packages is easiest if you are using the Anaconda Python distribution, a package manager for Python. Most of the necessary packages can be installed by doing

conda env create -f environment.yml

which creates the conda environment galdyncourse. Activate this environment with

source activate galdyncourse

Some packages cannot be installed through conda, for those run (after activating the environment)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, a small set of tools in the galdyncourse_util package specific to these notes can be installed with

python setup.py install

If you have setup your environment this way, don't forget to activate the environment every time you want to use it using

source activate galdyncourse