ASTR4B: Introduction to Stars and Galaxies |
This class is a general education course in everything astronomy that isn't planets! The course is split into three main sections. In the first section we'll go over some essentials of astronomy, such as a historical view of our understanding of the Solar System, what physics tells us about light that we'll be looking at from the sky, and how things move around in space. The next section is all about stars, starting with the closest to us; the Sun. We'll then move on to all the different stars out there in the cosmos, and and how they live and die. This is a big chunk of the course, including some pretty weird concepts such as black holes and neutron stars. In the final few weeks of the course we'll squeeze in whatever we can on galaxies, starting with the Milky Way and working up from there. This course isn't too tough, but I will require a little bit of math here and there, this is a science class at university after all!
This class will meet three times a week over a the Fall semester. We followed the textbook Astronomy 2e by Fraknoi. It's free!
A copy of the most recent course syllabus can be found here.
PDFs of the most recently completd semester's lecture slides can be found in the ASTR4B folder at this url.
Part A1: Introduction
Part A2: Essential astronomy
Part A3: Physics
Part A4: The night's sky
Part A5: Light
Part B1: The Sun
Part B2: Stars
Part B3: Interstellar medium
Part B4: Stellar evolution
Part B5: Stellar death
Part C1: The Milky Way
Part C2: Galaxies