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)
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
.
"
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:
Last update: Today
|