No one textbook seems to cover all aspects of this course. This page is meant to be an expanded version of the list of books, lecture notes, and other online material given in the syllabus.
The whole course?
- Yale University offers an upper-level undergraduate class titled Physical Processes in Astronomy that has a similar distribution of fluids, gravity, and radiation topics as our class (not much magnetism, though). On the linked page, Prof. Frank van den Bosch provides a 210-page PDF set of lecture notes, and problem sets with solutions.
- Jeremy Heyl, from the University of British Columbia, has posted lecture notes for a course on Astrophysical Processes that covers much of the radiative and fluid-dynamics content of this course (though not much gravitational dynamics).
Magnetohydrodynamics and Transport Phenomena
- The book Plasma Physics for Astrophysics, by Russell M. Kulsrud (Princeton U. Press, 2005) provides a good, but sometimes terse, graduate-level overview of the majority of topics in the first half of this course.
- The book Physics of Solar System Plasmas, by Thomas Cravens (Cambridge U. Press, 1997) covers MHD and collisionless plasma physics, with a focus on solar/space physics applications.
- Steven J. Schwartz, David Burgess, and Chris Owen taught a graduate course on "Astrophysical Plasmas" and made available their excellent 123-page set of lecture notes online. Get the original from Schwartz's web page, or see our own local copy.
- The venerable Hendrik Spruit has written a 86-page introductory summary of "Essential magnetohydrodynamics for astrophysics." The link to the most up-to-date version on arXiv is HERE.
- Richard Fitzpatrick of the University of Texas at Austin assembled his lecture notes on "Plasma Physics" into some useful online resources. Go here for his HTML notes, plus a link to purchase the book version.
- James Callen (U. Wisconsin, Madison) posts online draft versions of a subset of chapters from his book Fundamentals of Plasma Physics. I find his coverage of Coulomb collisions & transport theory quite insightful.
- Daniel Arovas (UC San Diego) posts several excellent lecture note files on: (1) thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (440-page PDF), and (2) non-equilibrium statistical physics (204-page PDF).
Gravitational Dynamics
- The massive and mighty tome Galactic Dynamics, by James Binney and Scott Tremaine (2nd ed., Princeton U. Press, 2008), is classic resource for large-scale N-body systems and collision statistics.
- The book Solar System Dynamics, by Carl Murray and Stanley Dermott (Cambridge U. Press, 1999), is considered a mainstay in covering the gravitational dynamics of small numbers of bodies (though I haven't yet read much of it).
- Sunil Golwala at Caltech posted classical mechanics lecture notes (396-page PDF) that cover central-force motion and Lagrangian & Hamiltonian dynamics.
- David Tong (Cambridge, UK) posted insightful lecture notes on classical dynamics. Good source for the truly "classical" fundamentals.
- Here's Richard Fitzpatrick again. I've known about his plasma physics notes (see above) for years, but I recently learned about his exhaustive lecture notes on Newtonian dynamics. Go here for HTML or PDF (or print on-demand!) versions of these notes. Primarily for upper-level undergrads, but the basics are always useful.
Radiative Processes
- The book Radiative Processes in Astrophysics, by George Rybicki and Alan Lightman (Wiley, 1979), is an excellent introduction to the radiative topics of this course.
- The second half of George Collins' book The Fundamentals of Stellar Astrophysics contains a nice pedagogical overview of radiative transfer (for stars). The book is available in full online at ADS, but the PDF version occasionally contains garbled mathematics.
- Rob Rutten created an extensive set of lecture notes on radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres (with a bit of an emphasis on the Non-LTE upper layers most relevant to the solar chromosphere). HERE is a link to Rutten's external web page, which contains the full set of PDF notes (275 pages) and many other useful files.
- Also, Dr. J. B. Tatum posted many of his lecture notes on stellar atmospheres and radiative transfer. I've archived his 11 chapters here:
1. Definitions of and Relations between Quantities used in Radiation Theory
2. Blackbody Radiation
3. The Exponential Integral Function
4. Flux, Specific Intensity and other Astrophysical Terms
5. Absorption, Scattering, Extinction and the Equation of Transfer
6. Limb Darkening
7. Atomic Spectroscopy
8. Boltzmann's and Saha's Equations
9. Oscillator Strengths and Related Topics
10. Line Profiles
11. Curve of Growth