Introduction to Astronomy Ronen Plesser

An introduction to astronomy through a broad survey of what we know about the universe and how we know it. Next Session:

Nov 27th 2012 (9 weeks long) You are enrolled!

Workload: 6-8 hours/week

About the Course

In this class, we will be studying, quite literally, everything in the universe. We will start with "classical" astronomy, describing the night sky and organizing what we see as was done in ancient times. We will then embark on a journey, starting here on Earth and progressing outward, to study the Solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the wonderful and strange objects we observe in deep space, such as black holes, quasars, and supernovae. We will end with some discussion of what scientists know today about the universe as a whole. Along the way we will introduce some of the methods, theoretical and experimental, that have been used to understand all of this, from Newton's laws, through our understanding of light and matter, to Einstein's theory of relativity, and from Galileo's telescope to WMAP (The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) also known as the Microwave Anisotropy
Probe (MAP), and Explorer 80 is a spacecraft which measures differences in the temperature of the Big Bang's remnant radiant heat [4][5] the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation across the full sky. Headed by Professor Charles L. Bennett, Johns Hopkins University, the mission was developed in a joint partnership between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Princeton [6] University. The WMAP spacecraft was launched on June 30, 2001, at 19:46:46 GDT, from Florida. The WMAP mission succeeds the COBE space mission and was the second medium-class (MIDEX) spacecraft of the Explorer program. In 2003, MAP was renamed [6] WMAP in honor of cosmologist David Todd Wilkinson (19352002), who had been a member of the mission's science team.

.)

About the Instructor(s)

Ronen Plesser is an associate professor of physics and mathematics at Duke University. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1991, and held positions at Yale University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Weizmann Institute of Science before joining the Duke faculty in 1997. His research interests center on the interplay of geometry and physics in the context of string theory and particle physics. He has been teaching introductory astronomy at Duke since 2002.

Course Syllabus
Week 1: Positional Astronomy (naked-eye Astronomy) We will spend our first week familiarizing ourselves with descriptions of the positions and motions of celestial objects. Week 2: Newtons Universe Newtonian physics revolutionized the way we understand our Universe. We will discuss Newtons laws of mechanics, the conservation laws that follow from them, his theory of gravity and some applications to Astronomy, as well as some properties of radiation. The last clip will be a quick look at the features of quantum mechanics relevant to our course. This will be a particularly busy and challenging week, but hard work here will pay off later. Week 3: Planets We will not have time in this course to do any justice to the broad and exciting field of planetary science. We will spend the week on a general review of the properties and structure of our Solar System and our understanding of its origins and history. We will end with some discussion of the exciting discoveries over the past decade of many hundreds of extrasolar planets. Week 4: Stars

What we know about stars and a bit about how we found out. We will begin with a quick review of the best-studied star of all, our Sun. We will then talk about classifications; H-R diagrams and main sequence stars; distance, mass, and size measurements; binaries; clusters; and stellar evolution through the main sequence Week 5: Post-Main-Sequence Stars Final stages of stellar evolution and stellar remnants. Giants, white dwarves, novae, variable stars, supernovae, neutron stars and pulsars. Week 6: Relativity and Black Holes We will spend most of this week acquiring an understanding of the special theory of relativity. We will then discuss the general theory in a qualitative way, and discuss its application to black holes, gravitational lensing, and other phenomena of interest. Week 7: Galaxies Galactic structure and classification. Active galactic nuclei, quasars and blazars. Galactic rotation curves and dark matter. Galaxy clusters and large-scale structure. Week 8: Cosmology What we can say about the universe as a whole. Hubble Expansion. Big bang cosmology. The cosmic microwave background. Recent determination of cosmological parameters. Early universe physics.

Recommended Background
1. An interest in learning something about the universe we live in and a willingness to invest some thought and some work in this. 2. The ability to calculate with large and small numbers, e.g. to compute the product of and . 3. A familiarity with the rudiments of high-school algebra, the ability to solve an equation

like

to get

and comfortably use

this to obtain numerical values for in appropriate units given values of , , and , and to draw and use graphs to describe the properties of functions. 4. A basic background in science at a high school level. What elements, atoms, nuclei, magnetic fields, gravity, etc. are will be assumed familiar. The details of their physics or its mathematical description will not.

Suggested Readings
There are a lot of important and interesting facts to learn about astronomy, and lectures are a very inefficient way to learn facts. It would be extremely helpful, but not absolutely necessary, to read any of the many introductory astronomy texts that are out there as you take this class and to have it handy as a reference. The Wikibook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/General_Astronomy and Wikipedia entries for the topics mentioned in class would be quite sufficient for this purpose, as would the freely available online notes by Nick Strobel at http://www.astronomynotes.com/. In addition, I

recommend downloading and installing a planetarium application for your computer. Examples of free downloads sufficient for our purposes
includehttp://www.stellarium.org/ , http://www.astrosurf.com/c2a/ (Windows only) or http://www.api.net/skychart/.

Course Format
There will be video lectures broken up into clips 8-15min. long, about three hours of video per week. There will be quizzes to go with these as well as regular homework assignments.

FAQ

Will I get a certificate after completing this course? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.

Do I need to have had college physics or calculus to take this course? No. If you have had any of these, you will find them helpful but it is definitely possible to do this class and enjoy it without them. Supplementary notes reviewing the technical aspects of the physical principles we use will be posted to help keep the class as self-contained as possible.

Is this a hard course? It should be. If done right you will have learned in a few short weeks a lot of truly exciting science, and this will require putting in some time to work on it, and some hard thinking. It should also be a lot of fun.

Do I need a telescope to take this course? No. I will suggest some observing projects for naked-eye observing and some for telescope observing. If you can find a darkish place to look up at the night sky this will be both rewarding and instructive, and a telescope can amplify both effects if you know how to use it. But not all of us have access to such locations or equipment, and installing one of the planetarium software options allows you to make observations" on your monitor.

Categories: Physical & Earth Sciences