Astronomy 5682: Introduction to Cosmology
Spring 2023
Items handed out in class
As of April 5, the following items have been handed out:
Lecture notes
All notes are in pdf format.
Video links:
I will show some of these in class, but I probably won't get to all of them.
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Shoot-the-monkey illustration of the equivalence principle.
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Einstein's elevator, a
simple demonstration that objects travel on straight paths in a freely
falling reference frame.
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Weightlessness in the International Space Station
- The Hulse-Taylor
binary pulsar. The first empirical evidence for gravitational waves.
- Discovery of
gravitational waves by LIGO. You can find a lot more videos and
images on the LIGO web sites.
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Flight through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey map of the universe.
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Flight through structure in the nearby universe.
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Flight outward through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
As we go out to greater distances, we are effectively
looking backward in time. The most distant galaxies here
are about 12 billion light years away.
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Computer simulation of the gravitational clustering of
dark matter. The expansion of the universe has been
scaled out, so that we are always looking at the same matter.
Rotation helps to see the 3-dimensional structure.
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Computer simulation of gravitational clustering of dark matter.
This video shows a 2-dimensional projection of a 3-dimensional
simulation, much larger in volume than the previous two.
The expansion of the universe has again been
scaled out.
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Flight through the large scale distribution of dark matter
in a computer simulation.
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Another computer simulation of dark matter clustering.
This time the expansion of the universe hasn't been
scaled out, but the video zooms in to show the formation of
a single dark matter halo.
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Computer simulation of the formation of a disk galaxy.
In addition to gravity, there are pressure forces on the
gas, and it is the combination of gravity, rotation,
these pressure forces, and dissipation of energy that
leads to the formation of a thin disk.
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An even better computer simulation of the formation of a disk galaxy.
The small panels show a larger scale view (at lower left) and
zoomed in views of the gas and stars (at lower right).
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Simulation of a galaxy merger, which stops
at several points to compare to images of observed merging galaxies.
Go to David Weinberg's Home Page
Updated: 2023 April 19[dhw]
