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Session 32 - Curriculum in Crisis: Reinventing Stellar Astrophysics for Today's Graduate Student.
Oral session, Tuesday, June 11
Playcircle,
High redshift quasars represent the earliest structures in the universe for which we can quantitativly measure physical properties such as chemical composition, mass, and luminosity. They present a rich emission line spectrum produced by a dilute gas far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Properly interpreted the spectrum could reveal the initial conditions within galaxies forming in the young universe. We outline the broad computation challenges in radiative transfer and atomic physics which must be solved to fully exploit this information.
