ASTR 506 (High Energy Astrophysics) is a 3-credit graduate-level course.
Meetings: TTh 9:30 - 10:45 pm, Barber 156
Office hours: Tuesdays 1:00 - 2:00 pm, or send me email at stairs@astro.ubc.ca
Current important messages:
Class cancelled Tues. Oct. 9 -- we will make this up later.
Make-up class TBD
Classic paper possibilities:
On the theory of white dwarf stars. I. The energy sources of white dwarfs by Mestel
Erik: Pulsar Electrodynamics by Goldreich and Julian
Emmanuel: Black holes in binary systems. Observational appearance by Shakura and Sunyaev (not the full paper!)
Peter: Transient optical emission from the error box of the γ-ray burst of 28 February 1997 by van Paradijs et al. and Discovery of an X-ray afterglow associated with the γ-ray burst of 28 February 1997 by Costa et al.
Kathryn: A millisecond pulsar in an X-ray binary system by Wijnands and van der Klis and The two-hour orbit of a binary millisecond X-ray pulsar by Chakrabarty and Morgan
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.
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
