Increasing knowledge and management strategies

References and Resources for Extragalactic Astronomy

for KYA306, autumn 2017

Textbooks

Because understanding of galaxy morphology, formation, evolution and large scale structure isn’t as far advanced as undertanding of stars, the field is chang- ing rapidly and textbooks tend to become out of date relatively quickly. However the basic underlying physics doesn’t change nearly so much, and the fundamen- tals are done in textbooks much more carefully than in most “up to date” online resources. The ones listed below also have very thorough bibliographies includ- ing references to essential technical papers in the literature.

• L.S. Sparke & J.S. Gallagher, Galaxies in the Universe: an Introduction, 2nd Edition (2007). The rare example of a textbook that handles most of the physical and astronomical background to galaxies and extragalactic astronomy at a level between introductory and postgraduate, and also good because it’s available in paperback.

• J. Binney & M. Merrifield, Galactic Astronomy (1998). This is regarded as the definitive essential text in galaxies from an observational perspective, including both the Milky Way and external galaxies. This is an update on the previous classic text of the same name, by Mihalas & Binney.

• J. Binney & S. Tremaine, Galactic Dynamics, 2nd Edition (2008). Ridicu- lously comprehensive companion to Galactic Astronomy, covering galaxy formation, mergers, dark matter, spiral structure, equilbrium and stability of stellar systems, dynamical evolution of orbits, an numerical simulations of all of the above.

Lecture Notes

Extragalactic Astronomy is a huge topic to try to over in just a few lectures – in fact that would be impossible, which is why I’ll just try to introduce a few of the most essential topics (phenomena and their underlying physics) – so I don’t feel bad about giving you links to a set of web pages that follow about a 60 lec- ture presentation of the topic at the University of Virginia (one of the top 20 or so research schools in astrophysics in the US). The link to the course main page is

http://people.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/astr5630/index_frames.html

Some topics are more developed than others but the presentation is generally pretty clear.

1

Catalogues and Resources

Knowing what there is to know is the first step to becoming a successful re- searcher. So much is out there that it can be a struggle to organise all the information and learn what is known vs. what is uncertain or unknown. One of the best starting points is:

NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED).

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu

NED allows you to search for objects by position on the sky or by name. Contains links to data, images, references, coordinate transformations, cosmol- ogy calculators, etc . There’s also a Literature search feature including a handy link called Knowledgebase (Level 5) which connects to online review articles, catalogs, and fundamental data.

Galaxy Catalogues

References to these are encountered all over the place. The most important galaxy catalogue is:

RC3, the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (1991), by de Vau- couleurs et al., which systematically gives positions, classifications, magnitudes, colours, radial velocities, and other information for around 25,000 galaxies. This is considered the fundamental reference work for bright galaxies, and the basis for most of the information in NED.

2