AS4013 Stellar Physics: Stellar Atmospheres, Structure, & Interiors

AS3003 Stellar Physics: Stellar Atmospheres, Structure, & Interiors


The course is split into two sections: Stellar Atmospheres and Stellar Structure & Interiors.

The atmospheres part will focus mostly on radiation transfer techniques: basic definitions, equation of radiation transfer, moment equations, analytic approximations at small and large optical depth, the gray atmosphere, spectral line broadening, curve of growth. At the end of the atmospheres section I'll be presenting a few lectures on Monte Carlo radiation transfer techniques that I use extensively in my own research on circumstellar disks and the interstellar medium.

Course Texts:

``Radiative Transfer in Stellar Atmospheres'' by Rob Rutten
This is the text that I'm using for definitions, equations, etc in the Stellar Atmospheres part of the course. The text is not published, but the latest version is available from Rob Rutten's webpage: Latest version. The version I used to prepare the lecture notes below is from December 1 2000. There are two copies of this in the Physics & Astronomy Library.

``Introduction to Monte Carlo Radiation Transfer'' by Wood, Bjorkman, Whitney & Wolff POSTSCRIPT PDF
This is a short booklet that we prepaperd on basic Monte Carlo radiation transfer techniques. It covers everything I'll present in the Monte Carlo lectures at the end of the Stellar Atmospheres part of the course. A plane parallel isotropic scattering code and some three dimensional scattering codes are available here.

Other stellar atmospheres books that I'll refer to are:
``Observation and Analysis of Stellar Photospheres'' by David Gray
``Stellar Atmospheres'' by Dimitri Mihalas
This book is out of print, but is in the Physics & Astronomy Library. It is generally beyond the scope of this short course, but is the authoratative textbook on the subject.

``Introduction to the Theory of Stellar Structure and Evolution'' by Dina Prialnick
This is the text for the stellar structure part of the course.

Lecture Notes

For the atmospheres section, the lecture notes below are more detailed than the skeleton slides I will present in class. For the stellar structure & interiors section, the notes on the webpage are the same as what I'll present in class.

Atmospheres

Lecture 1: Introduction Postscript PDF

Lecture 2: Radiation Field Basics I Postscript PDF

Lecture 2a: Radiation Field Basics II Postscript PDF

Lecture 3: Line Transitions & Opacity Postscript PDF

Lecture 4: Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium Postscript PDF

Lecture 5: Formal Solution of Equation of Radiation Transfer Postscript PDF

Lecture 6: Analytic Solutions I Postscript PDF

Lecture 7: Analytic Solutions II Postscript PDF

Lecture 8: Analytic Solutions III Postscript PDF

Lecture 9: Model Atmospheres Postscript PDF

Lecture 10: Spectral Lines I Postscript PDF

Lecture 11: Spectral Lines II Postscript PDF

Lecture 12: Monte Carlo I Postscript PDF

Lecture 13: Monte Carlo II Postscript PDF

Interiors

Lecture 14: Stellar structure: Timescales Postscript PDF

Lecture 15: Equations of stellar structure Postscript PDF

Lecture 16: Solving the stellar structure equations Postscript PDF

Lecture 17: Virial theorem Postscript PDF

Lecture 18: Star formation Postscript PDF

Lecture 19: Deriving the equation of state Postscript PDF

Lecture 20: Opacity Postscript PDF

Lecture 21: Thermonuclear reactions Postscript PDF

Lecture 22: Approximate structure models Postscript PDF

Lecture 23: Understanding the main sequence Postscript PDF

Lecture 24: Post-main-sequence evolution Postscript PDF

Tutorials

Tutorial 1 PDF

Tutorial 2 PDF

My Homepage