AST-101 (Spring 2024)

AST-101 (Spring 2024)

Lecture Slides

Astronomy before the commen era - Copernicus revolution, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and Galileo's vision - Newtonian celestial mechanics - Solar System: planets, moons, and all that... - Solar System: origin and exploration - Stars and Galaxies: astronomically far away - What are stars made of? - Classifying stars: The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram - Life cycle of the Sun - The stellar graveyard - Hubble's law and the expanding Universe - The Big Bang Theory - Are we alone?: Space colonization and the Fermi paradox -

Focus Group Assignments

Assignment I (March 18) -- Assignment II (May 6)

Lecture Notes

Additional Material

Astronomy (A. Fraknoi, D. Morrison, S. C. Wolff) - Eratosthenes @ Cosmos (by Carl Sagan) - The shape of planet Earth - Key ideas in computing stellar distances -

The First Three Minutes (by Steven Weinberg) -

Lecture notes on: "are we alone?" -

Lecture notes on: "what's stopping us from going to Mars " -

Lecture notes on: "life on Venus?" Searching for toxic microbes on Venus clouds