Spring 2015

Lecture: Thursday

Location: J. C. Long, room 219

Time: 4:00 – 5:15 PM

Office: J. C. Long, room 206

Office hours: T 3:00 – 4:00 pm

Phone: (843) 953-3609

A preliminary outline of the course can be found at the SCHEDULE website. Some of this material is subject to change and this site will be constantly up-dated so please check it before each class.

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Syllabus

Required materials:

The required textbook for the course is

Gravity’s Fatal Attraction, Black Holes in the Universe Second Edition by Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees.

Recommended textbook for the course is Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne

Course Objectives:

Students will be introduced to several special topics related to black holes and their environments. They will learn to analyze and interpret data collected from recent observations of objects that harbor black holes, and perform numerical and theoretical calculations to estimate the observed properties of black holes.

Learning Outcomes:

Demonstrate conceptual understanding (through quizzes, projects, and tests) of the following topics:

Gravitational Lensing by Black Holes

The effects of general relativity on GPS satellites

Calculations of the precession rate for a binary pulsar

Frame Dragging with Gravity Probe B

Extreme effects near a black hole

Black hole entropy and Hawking radiation

Black Hole Accretion Disks and an introduction to calculating accretion disk spectra

A method of finding stellar-mass black holes

Microquasars - Stellar-mass black holes with jets

Analyzing spectra of black hole accretion disks to constrain their mass and spin.

SPECIFICS

CREDIT: This is a one-credit course.

PREREQUISITES: This course is designed for science majors. Prerequisite is PHYS.112 and corequisite is ASTRO.210.

PROJECT/PRESENTATION: Every student will be expected to complete a research project on a special topic related to material covered in the course. A report describing the results of this project will be due near the end of the semester.

Students are expected to present their research project to the class. The presentation may be in PowerPoint, Keynote, overhead or blackboard. It should include a list of references.

There will be a date near the end of the semester allocated to these research presentations.

Grades

Your final grade will be calculated as follows:

Project / Presentation	80%
Participation	20%

Your number grade will be converted into a letter grade as follows.

>85%	A
80-84%	A-
76-80%	B+
72-76%	B
68-72%	B-
64-68%	C+
60-64%	C
56-60%	C-
52-56%	D+
48-52%	D
44-48%	D-
<44%	F

Special Needs

If you have any special needs or disabilities that might require special arrangements to be made for any aspect of this course, please let me know at the beginning of the semester or as soon as you become aware of them.

Class Policies:

Cellular technology: Please respect your classmates and keep your cellular devices off.

Cheating:

Violations of the College of Charleston Honor Code (including cheating or attempted cheating) will be referred to the Office of Student Affairs for adjudication. Examples of cheating include copying test or quiz answers, using cellular technology to communicate information during a test or quiz, copying homework answers verbatim from an external source.