Theoretical Astrophysics - Stellar Evolution

Material developed for the ASTR/PTYS 545 course (one semester) at the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona (Spring semester 2026).

• Syllabus
• Lectures
• Projects and presentations

Technical details

The lecture notes are written as emacs org files available in ./org-content and exported to html (available online here, the output of the export also relies on the css and html templates in ./html-content), and in pdf (compiled with LaTeX) for printing and annotating before I give a lecture.

How to build it?

The script build.sh is the main script to build the website. It first checks if the flag --all was passed as an argument, in which case it will build all the org files, otherwise it will look for the org-files that have been modified using git diff and only build those.

The script actually calls emacs to do the build (with -Q flag so the process does not depend on my specific emacs configuration), which is run by build.sh in script mode to run the elisp script build-site.el.

build-site.el checks for the htmlize and ox-publish packages, and installs them locally if they are not available, then exports to html the appropriate files (either all the org files or the ones modified since the last commit) to the folder html-content, and hands back the control to build.sh, which finishes things by pushing to this repo and rsync the html files from the server where I host the website (this is just because the server is very old and I cannot have a modern version of emacs to build directly there).

Log

Each semester’s website will be archived as a release.

Feedback

• [ ] clarify instructions for submission of final project materials
  • submission of manuscript: email cc-ing instructor and referees, author_last_name_topic.pdf
  • referee reports: email cc-ing author and instructor (but not the other referee), referee_last_name_referee_author_last_name_topic.pdf
• [ ] provide examples of referee report and written manuscript?
• [ ] HW on Chandrasekhar mass: design approximation bypassing Lane-Emden equation?
• [ ] MESA-web final condition for WD models fails
• [ ] mid-term exam question: when is R_o reached should specify “in gravothermal equilibrium”
• [ ] mid-term exam question: R(Z) better done with radiative envelope, ask comparison at fixed X_c and fixed t
• [ ] mid-term exam: too long to go through without TA