Instructor
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Overview
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
Course Materials
Download all course pages [zip - 10MB]
Texts
See reading assignments for individual lectures
About the instructor
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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.
Course content
Lecture 1 - Introduction
Lecture 2 - Planetary Orbits
Lecture 3 - Our Solar System and the Pluto Problem
Lecture 4 - Discovering Exoplanets: Hot Jupiters
Lecture 5 - Planetary Transits
Lecture 6 - Microlensing, Astrometry and Other Methods
Lecture 7 - Direct Imaging of Exoplanets
Update 1 - The Kepler Mission
Lecture 8 - Introduction to Black Holes
Lecture 9 - Special and General Relativity
Lecture 10 - Tests of Relativity
Lecture 11 - Special and General Relativity (cont.)
Lecture 12 - Stellar Mass Black Holes
Lecture 13 - Stellar Mass Black Holes (cont.)
Lecture 14 - Pulsars
Lecture 15 - Supermassive Black Holes
Exam 2 - Midterm Exam 2
Lecture 16 - Hubble's Law and the Big Bang
Lecture 17 - Hubble's Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
Lecture 18 - Hubble's Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
Lecture 19 - Omega and the End of the Universe
Lecture 20 - Dark Matter
Lecture 21 - Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe and the Big Rip
Lecture 22 - Supernovae
Lecture 23 - Other Constraints: The Cosmic Microwave Background
Lecture 24 - The Multiverse and Theories of Everything
