** ASU (Under)Graduate Astrophysics Seminar, Fall 2006

AST 494 / AST 591 — Astrophysics Seminar, Fall 2006
Black Hole Growth & Galaxy Assembly:
From First Light & Reionization to the Present


Meeting Time:   Friday  12:15 -- 1:30 PM      (First meeting: Fri Aug 25  12:15 PM)

Place:            PSF 226
SLN:            02489 for AST 591; 95992 for AST 494
Instructor:    Prof. Rogier Windhorst
Website:        http://windhorst591.asu.edu/ or http://windhorst494.asu.edu/
If SESE server down:    http://www.asu.edu/clas/hst/classes/ast591/ or http://www.asu.edu/clas/hst/classes/ast494/

Rogier Windhorst: office: PSF 246
office hours: Mo: 5:00-6:00 pm
e-mail: Rogier.Windhorst@asu.edu (response time = a few days)
telephone: (480) 965-7143 (response time = immediately)


Scroll down to table of Fall 2006 Seminar and Journal Club presentations and presenters  

Course Objectives:
The aim of this course is to introduce you, the students, to a series of short seminal papers and on more recently published work in the general area of this semester's broad topic. The emphasis should lie on the development of scientific theory and method, rather than on just the latest discovery or measurement or incremental improvement in a particular technique.
Oral reports on the papers selected will be presented in class at the rate of one 50 minute or two ~25 minute presentations per week. Each student will be responsible for one long or two short reports. Oral reports by senior graduate students and postdocs would be on a voluntary and as-time-permits basis only, but there are still several times slots available. Each report should consist of a general introduction covering the scope of the paper and where it fits within the larger field of research of which the paper is part, followed by a more detailed summary of the paper and a discussion of its impact. Each presentation is followed by time for questions and answers, and discussion.
Dates for the presentations(s) by each student will be assigned within the first week of the first class — first come, first serve. The choice of paper to discuss will be up to the student, but certain restrictions and requirements will apply (see also Tips.., below). I'll be happy to discuss that choice and offer suggestions.

Presentations:
The majority of the work for this class will revolve around computer-based presentations (i.e., HTML, PDF, Power Point, etc..). A laptop computer running Redhat 9 or CentOS Linux (with Mozilla 1.4.2 browser, Acrobat Reader 5.0 [PDF], and OpenOffice 1.0.2 [PPT]) will be available in the classroom to give the presentation, but students are free to bring and use their own Windows, Linux or Macintosh laptop should they have one. If you use a Macintosh, remember to bring a DVI to VGA adapter.
One week before their scheduled presentation, each student should provide me with the reference to a paper of their choice. I will place a link on the class web-page to an electronic version of this paper (PDF/Postscript), so all other students can download and read it, formulate questions, and thus participate in the discussion of that paper during class.
If you prepare a PowerPoint presentation and do not plan to use your own laptop, send your presentation no later than the afternoon preceding class to me by e-mail as an attachment so I can check that it displays properly (Windows' proprietary fonts, e.g., math symbols, often don't!). In all cases, after you finish your talk, send the electronic presentation to me so I can create a link into the following table (see Seminar Schedule below) to it, so it can be viewed and consulted later.

Tips for finding a suitable paper:
Papers that had/have a large impact will be cited by many other authors. Papers with few or no citations, or mostly self-citations by the authors, are not suitable for discussion. Papers are required to (1) have been published in a peer reviewed journal and (2) have at least 3 citations by researchers other than the authors of that paper. I.e., discussion of a paper that recently appeared on 'astro-ph' is strongly discouraged unless the "Comments" give a specific volume/issue of the peer-reviewed journal where such paper is scheduled to appear and the citation requirement is satisfied.
For a 25 min presentation, single 4 or 5-page Letters are not suitable (but two related ones might well be). Typically, papers should be the equivalent of 8–10 pages in a main journal (multi-page tables or atlases of figures, and the list of references don't count).
Although not a complete depository of all scientific literature in astronomy and astrophysics, none the less, astronomy as a science is blessed in having a very large, full-text digital library: the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) ( http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html ). The best astronomical reprint server is on: http://xxx.lanl.gov/find/astro-ph ). For example, two recent papers that put this class in context and that can be found on LANL and ADS , respectively, are:

1. astro-ph/0601202 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Did Galaxy Assembly and Supermassive Black-Hole Growth go hand-in-hand?
Authors: R.A. Windhorst, S.H. Cohen, A.N. Straughn, R.E. Ryan Jr., N.P. Hathi, R.A. Jansen (ASU), A.M. Koekemoer, N. Pirzkal, C. Xu, B. Mobasher, S. Malhotra, L. Strolger, J.E. Rhoads (STScI)
Comments: 9 pages, Latex2e requires 'elsart' and 'elsart3' (included), 10 postscript figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the Leiden Workshop on "QSO Host Galaxies: Evolution and Environment", eds. P.D. Barthel & D.B. Sanders (New Astron. Rev., 2006)
 


2 2006NewAR..50..113W
1.00003/2006A      E  F      X                      R  C      S              U      
Windhorst, Rogier A.; Cohen, Seth H.; Jansen, Rolf A.; Conselice, Chris; Yan, Haojing
How JWST can measure first light, reionization and galaxy assembly



A full text, printable version of this paper may be obtained by clicking on the "F" link (or by clicking on the full reference link or "A" link, and following the links on the abstract page that it opens). Often, there is also a "G" that points to GIF-format scans of each page of the paper or an "E" that points to an HTML version (both may come handy to extract/retrieve a digital version of a figure, table or equation to insert in your presentation). To check whether a paper has a sufficient number of citations, one can click the link marked "C".

The following is the schedule of AST 591/494 presentations. During the first day of classes (Aug. 25, we will have a lunch talk to introduce the topic by guest speaker Dr. JunXian Wang (Center for Astrophysics, University of Science and Technology of China), as indicated below:

If you are not certain what paper to choose for this semesters Journal Club, please browse all the review papers in the following conference proceedings:
2006, Proceedings of the Leiden/Lorentz Workshop on ``QSO Host Galaxies: Evolution and Environments'',
Eds. P. D. Barthel & D. B. Sanders, New Astron. Rev., Vol. 50, and

Ferrarese & Ford (2005),
Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research, 2005SSRv..116..523F ,
and find the corresponding journal papers by the relevant first authors on ADS or on LANL .
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Fall 2006 Seminar and Journal Club Schedule
Date Presenter(s) Paper(s) Title(s) + links to paper(s) or presentation(s)
8/25    R. Windhorst/Dr. J. Wang   J. Wang et al. (2006)   Intro to Class / Lunch-talk by Dr. JunXian Wang on ``The population of obscured quasars''. 2006ApJ...646L.103W
9/01    Dr. H. Rottgering (U. Leiden)   Rottgering et al. (2005, 2003). Lunch-talk on LOFAR   ``LOFAR: Opening up a new window on the Universe and on AGN''. 2006_Oxford_Review_paper, , 2005pgqa.conf..381R , 2003NewAR..47..405R
9/08    R. Windhorst/Dr. S. Cohen   S. Cohen et al. (2006) and Straughn et al. (2006)   ``Clues to Active Galactic Nucleus Growth from Optically Variable Objects in the HUDF''. 2006ApJ...639..731C , and 2006ApJ...639..724S
9/15    Carola Ellinger   F. Melia & H. Falcke (2001)   ``The Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center ''. 2001ARA&A..39..309M
9/22    Russell E. Ryan, Jr.  G. Kauffmann & M. Haehnelt (2000)   A unified model for the evolution of galaxies and quasars 2000MNRAS.311..576K
9/29    Wendy Hawley   Tremaine et al. (2002) Ferrarese et al. (2000)   The Slope of the Black Hole Mass versus Velocity Dispersion Correlation 2002ApJ...574..740T A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies 2000ApJ...539L...9F
10/06    Adam Mott   Rodriguez et al. (2006)   A Compact Supermassive Binary Black Hole System , 2006ApJ...646...49R
10/13    Raman Narayan  Vestergaard & Peterson (2006) , Peterson (2006) , (2004)   Determining Central Black Hole Masses in Distant AGN 2006ApJ...641..689V , Black hole masses based on reverberation mapping of the BLR 2006MmSAI..77..581P , 2004IAUS..222...15P
10/20    No Class, instead:   Lunch at Old Main   See this URL
10/27    Vithal Shettilvi   Hopkins et al. (2006)   How Much Mass Do Supermassive Black Holes Eat in Their Old Age? 2006ApJ...643..641H
11/03    Brian Gleim   postponed till 12/01  
11/10        Veterans holiday?
11/17    Beatrice Perret   Springel et al. (2005)   Modelling feedback from stars and black holes in galaxy mergers 2005MNRAS.361..776S
11/24        Thanksgiving holiday
12/01    Brian Gleim   C. Peng et al. (2006)   Probing the Coevolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies Using Gravitationally Lensed Quasar Hosts 2006ApJ...649..616P
12/09        tbd (Final exam week)

    Recommended Dept. of Physics or SESE Colloquia (Th. 4:00 pm in PSF-123 or We. 3:40 pm in PSF-101, resp.)
    class introduction / Special Seminar by visiting scientist or new staff (may be Fri 12:15 PM / Mon 12:30 PM in PSF-226)
See also: http://windhorst103.asu.edu/links.html


Click on the links below for the Astrophysics Seminar schedules and student presentations of previous semesters:


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