ASTR 506 (High Energy Astrophysics) is a 3-credit graduate-level course.
Meetings: MWF 12:00 - 12:50 pm, Angus 228
Office hours: Tuesdays 2:00 - 3:00 pm, or send me email at stairs@astro.ubc.ca
Current important messages:
Class cancelled Wed. Sept. 14 -- we will make this up later.
Papers due Nov. 7.
Make-up classes to be held Friday Nov. 18 and Friday Nov. 25 at 3 pm in Hennings 318.
The Chandra data analysis part of Assignment 4 is here. There's another
analytic problem as well, sent out by email.
Useful and interesting links:
Listing of astronomical satellites, with launch dates, some specs and scientific contributions
HEASARC - NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Centre. You can download publically-available data and follow links to information about various missions.
Program and pdf lecture notes from the 4th International X-ray Astronomy School,
organized by NASA and the CXO Center at Harvard-Smithsomnian. Very good resource for detector info and scientific overviews.
Cole Miller's excellent neutron star page
The pulsar "post-Keplerian" parameters in General Relativity (See T. Damour & N. Deruelle, AIHP 44, 263 (1986))
A (fairly low-level and somewhat old) intro to cataclysmic variables, incorporating the phenomenology behind
the different names. The Tauris & van den Heuvel article (linked below) does
some of this for X-ray binaries.
Craig Sarazin's listing of supernova types (from his HEA class)
ADS and astro-ph abstract links for several useful review articles (and a couple of oldies-but-goodies) -- follow the links to access the full articles (html or pdf).
Hansen and Liebert on Cool White Dwarfs
Lattimer and Prakash on the Physics of Neutron Stars
Manchester on Observational Properties of Pulsars
Stairs on Binary Pulsars (yes, that's shameless self-promotion!)
Kaspi, Roberts and Harding on X-rays from Isolated Neutron Stars
Graham-Smith on The Radio Emission from Pulsars (nice observational and theoretical overview)
Woods and Thompson on Soft Gamma Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars: Magnetar Candidates
Bondi On Spherically Symmetric Accretion
Shakura and Sunyaev do simple accretion-disk calculations.
Tauris and van den Heuvel on Formation and Evolution of Compact Stellar X-ray Sources
van der Klis on Millisecond Oscillations in X-ray Binaries -- a bit beyond
the scope of the course, but interesting!
Ferrarese and Ford on Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research
