ASTR 506: High-Energy Astrophysics
3 credits
Pre-reqs: none

Evaluation: 20% assignments, 20% paper, 10% presentation on paper topic, 15% midterm, 35% final exam

Brief historical overview (< 1 week)

Very quick review of radiative processes: Synchrotron radiation, Compton scattering, bremsstrahlung (maybe 1.5 weeks)

Observational techniques: radio, X-ray, γ-ray, cosmic rays (2 weeks)

Compact stellar objects: 
white dwarfs: Fermi energy, polytropes, Lane-Emden, M_CH, cooling (1.5 weeks)
neutron stars: structure, cooling, manifestations (1.5 weeks)
black holes: GR in a nutshell, BH properties (0.5 week)
accretion disks and processes: Bondi-Hoyle, thin disks, alpha-prescription, observational evidence (2 weeks)
accretion onto compact objects: boundary layer, magnetic field, accretion/magnetospheric/corotation radii (2 weeks)

Interstellar medium and the Galaxy: 
supernovae and remnant evolution (1 week)
cosmic rays, Fermi process, Galactic synchrotron (1 week)

Extragalactic sources: 
AGN: phenomenology, unified model, size and mass estimates, accretion flows, growth, iron lines, reverberation mapping (1.5 weeks)
Radio galaxies in particular (0.5 week)

If time: GRBs and X-ray flashes.