Courses
Prof. Szulagyi teaches Planet Formation during the fall semesters, and Advanced Computational Methods in Astrophysics during the spring semesters. See the syllabus of each course below.
Planet Formation (fall semesters)
This course reviews the formation processes of terrestrial- and gaseous planets, and their moons. It provides a basic understanding on how our Solar System came to be, and how other planetary systems form, as well as how/when planets & moons can be habitable places for life.
Content:
- Planet types
- The Solar System planets
- Extrasolar Planets
- The protoplanetary disk where planets are forming. The initial conditions for planet formation.
- The formation of the building blocks of planets (so-called “planetesimals”)
- Terrestrial Planet formation
- Formation models of giant planets
- Formation of moons
- Evolution of planetary systems, orbital evolution of planets, resonances, planet-disk interactions
- Origin of life, habitability, astrobiology
Advanced Methods in Computational Astrophysics (spring semesters)
We review the various computational methods used in (astro)physics, with a problem-oriented approach: we take an astrophysical problem and discuss how to solve that type of problem numerically. We will do data analysis, computer simulations, and visualization approaches that are not only used in astrophysics, but other physical fields, mathematical fields and engineering.
Content:
- advanced linux terminal commands & scripts, e.g. how to use awk as a computing tool, how to manipulate big data with shell scripts
- astronomical databases and archives to retrieve data for computations & statistics
- Gnuplot as a visualization and computing tool
- time series analysis (Discrete Fourier Transformation, power spectrum, box-fitting least square)
- population synthesis & Markov chain Monte Carlo
- N-body simulations
- hydrodynamical/computational fluid dynamics simulations (various methods, mesh refinement)
- 3D visualization and rendering with Paraview, streamline integration, animations
- basics of High Performance Computing10) Radiative Transfer with flux limited diffusion approx, role of opacity, opacity considerations and computations; Radiative transfer with ray-tracing approach (using RADMC-3D)