In Winter 2017, I will be teaching a PHYS 495/595 course on Star Formation. The course is intended for senior undergraduates and graduate students.

Pre-requisites

For PHYs 495, you should have taken ASTRO 320 or 322. ASTRO 465 is an asset, but it is not a requirement. For PHYS 595, all you need is graduate standing.

Format

The course is scheduled to run on Monday afternoons from 2 p.m. to 4:50 p.m. in CCIS 4-285. This three-hour course block is designed to accommodate a seminar class format. Seminars are different from the usual kind of lecture in that it will be a small student-driven course. There will be no planned lectures by me, but there may be a few short presentations. Instead, I will act as a facilitator for a broader course. This course format was pioneered through the tutorial system at Oxford and expanded to many other institutions. A typical week in a seminar course will involve:

• Assigned reading and homework problems: Prior to the seminar, you will be assigned reading from the book and some problems. You will hand the problems in at the seminar. The problems and reading provide a first pass through the material. I will have a large number of office hours during the week in anticipation that you will come by and ask lots of questions.

• Presentations: During the seminar, presentations will be given by students (and me) in the class to cover material, including journal articles, extra problems, or special topics. Graduate students will give more presentations than undergraduate students.

• Review of homework problems: We will discuss solutions to the problems posed during the week.

• Seminar Break: We all take turns bringing snacks, which are scientifically delicious.

Subjects Covered

We will cover a survey of the process of star formation and the initial conditions thereof in the cool interstellar medium. By the end of the course, you should be able to read review articles in the field and understand the fundamentals of the field. We will focus on a theoretical treatment of the work, with some introduction to the observations that support the current theory.

As our primary text, we will be using the Notes on Star Formation by Mark Krumholz with some supplementary readings. The PDF is available here. The notes cover most of what we’ll be covering in this course, but we will be supplementing these reading with some review articles.

Grading

Course grading has yet to be finalized, but I’m thinking of something like

Undergraduate:

• Homework: 40%
• Presentations: 25%
• Final Exam: 35%

Graduate students:

• Homework: 30%
• Presentations: 35%
• Final Exam: 35%

I will try to have Graduate students take an Oral Exam for a final exam, as it is good preparation for the exams you will face in the Graduate Program. Undergraduate students will hopefully have the option of taking an Oral Exam. I will have to sort out the details of the Oral Exam with the Associate Chair as regards University Policy.