ASTR 5580 - Cosmology

A core course intended for graduate students of astronomy and physics. The course explores the theory and observational evidence of modern cosmology. The course is self-contained and includes brief reviews of general relativity and other background physics and mathematics required to understand cosmology. The course will talk about basic equations describing the universe, the expansion and age of the universe, dark matter and dark energy, the thermal history of the universe, the origin of the light elements, and the blackbody spectra of the cosmic microwave background. The course will also cover topics about the origin of structures in the universe, including cosmological density field, growth of density perturbation, inflation, anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, galaxy formation, and comic reionization. Finally contemporary observational techniques to constrain cosmological parameters will be discussed.