Astrophysik

This moodle course belongs to the lecture
Software Tools for Astronomers WiSe 2023/24

This moodle course is connected to the lecture
'Distance Determinations' for MSc Astro in Winter 2023/2024

Digital image processing allow us to analyze the wealth of data captured by modern telescopes and satellites, and it provides access to the enormous data contained in astronomical databases. This lecture with computer exercises in MATLAB covers the fundamentals of image processing such as image enhancement, image restoration, color image processing, wavelet and multi-resolution processing, morphological image processing, image segmentation, and object recognition. In addition, a variety of techniques, commonly used in astronomy and astrophysics, will be introduced: optical flow measurements, speckle interferometry, phase diversity techniques, and Doppler imaging.


This course will deal with astrophysical properties of exoplanets. Students will learn about the history of exoplanet detections, different detection methods and their areas of applicability, formation processes of exoplanets, planetary atmospheres and their evolution over time, as well as selected topics from current international research projects concerning exoplanets.

Lecture materials will be hosted here on moodle, as well as some supplementary tools and information.

The division between lecture and seminar will be performed very loosely. In practice, each sub-topic will have lectures where the students will learn about the relevant material, and there will be active participation parts (the seminar parts) where the students discuss with each other and the lecturer and present their ideas for solutions or approaches concerning specific topics on exoplanets.

Der Grundkurs Astrophysik ist eine jährlich angebotene zweisemestrige Lehrveranstaltung als Wahlpflichtfach im 3. Studienjahr des BSc-Studiengang Physik sowie in mehreren weiteren Studiengängen. Es wird ein Gesamtüberblick über die Astrophysik erarbeitet. Teil 1 findet turnusmäßig im Wintersemester statt, Teil 2 folgt im Sommersemester.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest and most recently gravitationally-collapsed objects in the Universe. Hence they provide us the opportunity to study an "ecosystem" - a volume that is a high-density microcosm of the rest of the Universe. Clusters are excellent laboratories for studying the rich astrophysics of baryons and dark matter. At the same time, they are extremely rare events, forming at sites of constructive interference of long waves in the primordial density fluctuations. Hence, they are very sensitive tracers of the growth of structure in the universe and the cosmological parameters governing it, which puts them into focus of constraining the properties of Dark Energy or to test whether our understanding of gravity is complete.

Multi-messenger astronomy is the coordinated observation and interpretation of astrophysical sources using different observational channels (messengers). In this respect, different messenger signatures can be caused by different processes. Hence, different messengers reveal different information about the astrophysical source. We will discuss some of the individual basics of electromagnetic, neutrino, gravitational-wave, and cosmic-ray observations and then will focus on multi-messenger sources and how we can combine information from different messengers.