This course focuses on three particularly interesting areas of astronomy that are advancing very rapidly: Extra-Solar Planets, Black Holes, and Dark Energy. Particular attention is paid to current projects that promise to improve our understanding significantly over the next few years. The course explores not just what is known, but what is currently not known, and how astronomers are going about trying to find out.
18 hours of lecture videos
24 lectures
10 Problem sets with solutions
Download all course pages [zip - 10MB]
See reading assignments for individual lectures
![]() |
Charles Bailyn is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Astronomy at Yale. He earned a B.S. in astronomy and physics from Yale in 1981 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1987. His recent research efforts have focused on observations of binary star systems containing black holes and on stellar collisions in dense star clusters. He has lectured on "How To See a Black Hole" to school groups, Yale alumni, and amateur astronomical societies. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers, and his work was featured in the PBS mini-series, Mysteries of Deep Space. |
astr 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics by Charles Bailyn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://oyc.yale.edu/astronomy/astr-160.