Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik Abteilung Astronomie Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany
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Lecture on High Energy Astrophysics WS 2011/12

Contents

Sketch of the environment of a rotation-powered pulsar. From Chaisson / McMillan, Astronomy Today

The goal of this lecture is to provide an overview of the processes in celestial objects that lead to high energy radiation (X-ray up to very high energy gamma radiation). A main focus of the lecture lies on the radiation mechanisms themselves (e.g. black body radiation, synchrotron radiation). Since the photon energy spectra are intimately related to the state of the matter which releases the radiation (e.g. an accretion disc in a binary system, plasma heated by supernova remnant shocks), we will also introduce some astrophysical processes and environments that produce the highly energetic states of matter. As a matter of fact, those processes are what we want to study when observing high energy spectra of celestial bodies.

The lecture will cover the following topics:

• Thermal radiation and black body radiation
• Photoelectric absorption and fluorescence lines
• Line diagnostics: Doppler- and relativistic line shift and broadening.
• Thompson scattering, Compton scattering
• Inverse Compton scattering, Comptonization
• Bremsstrahlung, synchrotron radiation, curvature radiation
• Accretion disks
• Shocks and Fermi acceleration
• Leptonic and hadronic particle interaction, neutrino production

The lecture is not limited to exploring electromagnetic radiation as source of information, other messengers (especially particles) will also eventually be discussed.

The lecture is complementary to the High Energy Sources lecture on Friday morning. There will be essentially no overlap between the two courses. Taking both courses is therefore encouraged (but by no means mandatory).

The lecture will be given by Prof. A. Santangelo, Dr. M. Sasaki, and Dr. G. Pühlhofer.

Literature

• M. S. Longair, "High Energy Astrophysics", Cambridge University Press. Really a general good textbook for High Energy Astrophysics, the standard. Try to catch the 2011 edition if you can. Used to be 2 volumes, but the latest 2011 edition is only one volume.
• G. Rybicki & A. Lightman, "Radiative Processes in Astrophysics", John Wiley & Sons. A really complete book on radiative processes.
• Ph. Charles & F. Seward, "Exploring the X-ray Universe", Cambridge University Press, 1995 or 2010 (try to catch the new edition). A good simple introduction to the X-ray observational aspects.
• Martin Pohl: Einführung in die Hochenergieastrophysik (in German), Shaker Verlag 2002.

Prerequisites

Basismodul Astronomie or comparable introductory course in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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Gerd Pühlhofer | Impressum Last modified 10 Oct 2011