Cosmo20

Kontakt

Prof. R. Verch
ITP, Universität Leipzig
Brüderstr. 16
Phone: +49 341 97 32423

Dr. M. Hänsel, D. Janssen
ITP, Universität Leipzig
Brüderstr. 16

Webpage: Rainer Verch

News:

Some of the students have noted that the dates of the online oral exams planned for 22-23 April have not been suitably communicated and that therefore, the preparation time is too short. In response to this, the exam dates are now re-scheduled to Fri 07 May and Mon 10 May. Further information on the exams will be forthcoming.

Lectures and Classes

Lectures
Prof. R. Verch
Mon 13.30-15.00 and Wed 15.15-16.45, ITP, Brüderstr. 16, SemRm 114 (to be confirmed)

Lecture 17.pdf (new edit)

Lecture 18.pdf

Lecture 19.pdf (new edit)

Lecture 20.pdf (new edit)

Exercise Class
tba

Recommended Literature:

A. Liddle, An Introduction to Modern Cosmology, Wiley, 2003 (reprint 2007)

H. Goenner, Einführung in die Kosmologie, Spektrum, 1994

S. Dodelson, Modern Cosmology, Academic Press, 2003

S. Weinberg, Cosmology, Oxford University Press, 2008

G.F.R. Ellis, R. Maartens, M.A.H. MacCallum, Relativistic Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 2012

C.W Misner, K.S. Thorne, J.A. Wheeler, Gravitation, W.H. Freeman and Co., 1973

R. d'Inverno, Introducing Einstein's Relativity, Oxford University Press, 1992

E.W. Kolb, M.S. Turner, The Early Universe, Addison-Wesley, 1990

Content: Foundations of modern Cosmology. Methods of observation, distance measurement and distance scales, elements of general relativity, homogeneous-isotropic cosmological spacetime models, cosmological standard model (Lambda-CDM), thermal evolution, nucleosynthesis, recombination, horizon problem, sketch of inflationary model, cosmological fluctuations

Additional Material

A virtual Universe is a video extract (by Nature Video) of a recent complex computer simulation from a group at MIT incorporating dark matter. It basically confirms that dark matter is an important ingredient for galaxy formation at the presently known relevant time scales.

Further scientifically based visualizations relating to the evolution of the Universe, galaxy formation etc are provided by the Illustris Project . It is worth looking at all the information held at this site.

This page on the age determination of a stellar cluster is instructive. It is taken from an e-learning course on astronomy at Penn State U. The page contains links to several other topics on globular stellar clusters.

The arXiv preprint of the PRL article on the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 from a binary black hole merger 1.3 M light years away.

A webpage of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope gives an introduction to gravitational lensing and dark matter with nice pictures and illustrations. There is also a short but instructive (partially historical) online survey article by Richard Ellis.

Astrophysicist Edward White at UCLA provides some interesting web-pages on topics related to cosmology. One is devoted to determining the Age of the Universe. That page also contains a link to a background fact sheet (by Chris Stassen) on isochron dating methods to determine the age of objects through radioactive decay from ratios of abundances of isotopes.

There are a number of modernized versions of the famous "Powers of Ten" video visualizing the various scales in the Universe. A very impressive example is an interactive representation titled The Scale of The Universe 2 by Cary and Michael Huang. As this interactive journey takes quite some loading time, there are several video extractions available on YouTube. Among the better ones is this:
The Smallest to the Biggest in the Universe

A schematic timeline of the universe is available from the website "Physics of the Universe" (by Luke Mastin). It is similar to the one presented in the lectures. There are also several others available on the internet.

The review articles on physical cosmology of Living Reviews in Relativity

Andrei Linde's review article (2007) on Inflationary Cosmology (from arXiv.org)

Andrei Linde's book "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology" is available as pdf file at arXiv.org

Norbert Straumann's review article on primordial fluctuations

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific provides a rich and interesting resource guide on cosmology for teaching purposes which is really worth having a look at.