Stars: Stellar Atmospheres, Structure, & Evolution

Stars: Stellar Atmospheres, Structure, & Evolution



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, Eddington-Milne line formation. 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:

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

``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.

Lecture Notes

Atmospheres & Monte Carlo

Introduction: PDF

Opacity Sources: PDF

LTE: PDF

Eddington-Barbier: PDF

Gray Atmosphere: PDF

Theoretical Spectrum: PDF

Dominant Opacity Sources: PDF

Model Atmospheres: PDF

Monte Carlo I: PDF

Monte Carlo II: PDF

Eddington-Milne Line Formation: PDF

Interiors & Evolution

Stellar structure: Timescales: PDF

Equations of stellar structure: PDF

Solving the stellar structure equations: PDF

Virial theorem: PDF

Star formation: PDF

Deriving the equation of state: PDF

Opacity: PDF

Thermonuclear reactions: PDF

Approximate structure models: PDF

Understanding the main sequence: PDF

Post-main-sequence evolution: PDF

Tutorials

Tutorial 1: PDF

Tutorial 2: PDF

Tutorial 2: PDF