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Course No. 1810 (96 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)

Taught by Alex Filippenko

University of California, Berkeley

Ph.D., California Institute of Technology

Who has not gazed with wonder at the night sky, especially from a dark site far away from city lights? The great canopy of stars stretching overhead suggests that our world is part of a vastly larger cosmos. But how large is it? Where do we fit in? And how did it all begin?

These questions have puzzled stargazers for thousands of years, and the search for answers helped spark the great advances of the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. But only in our own time has the full picture of the true immensity, variety, and surpassing strangeness of the Universe come into focus.

Explore Everything There Is in 96 Lectures

is a nontechnical description of where that picture stands today. In 96 richly illustrated half-hour lectures, you will survey the main concepts, methods, and discoveries in astronomy—in-depth—from the constellations drawn by the ancients, to the latest reports from planetary probes in the Solar System, to the most recent images offered by telescopes probing the farthest frontiers of space and time.

These lectures fully update Professor Alex Filippenko's 1998 edition of this course and his companion course from 2003. All of the material in this course is integrated so that one topic builds on another as you develop the conceptual tools that allow you to explore the Universe. For example, the study of the Solar System leads naturally to the investigation of planets around other stars and the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Likewise, rainbows and similar atmospheric phenomena introduce the subject of light, and light is the key to unraveling the mysteries of stars and galaxies.

Dr. Filippenko uses thousands of diagrams and photographs. There are almost 300 short movies and computer animations that make astronomical phenomena easier to understand, and they put planets, stars, and galaxies into context as you zoom through the cosmos. A showman in the classroom, Dr. Filippenko delights in simple, easily reproducible demonstrations that use tennis balls, apples, paper plates, and other objects to explain scientific concepts. Furthermore, he has a gift for analogies: at one point, he makes the energy content of one erg vivid by comparing it to one fly doing one push-up!

Altogether, this course is an unrivalled opportunity to experience a full-year introductory college course on astronomy, delivered by a five-time winner of "Best Professor" on campus at the University of California, Berkeley, who himself is a leading participant in some of the groundbreaking discoveries at the forefront of the field. Professor Filippenko is both a world-class teacher and researcher: In 2006 he was named one of four national Professors of the Year by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and in 1998 his international team of astronomers was credited with the top

"science breakthrough of the year" for their amazing discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up—a finding that is now shaking the foundations of physics.

The Universe Is more Exciting than Ever

Much has happened in astronomy in a few short years. Many of these new discoveries are scientifically sophisticated, but the comprehensive scope of this course allows you to absorb the background you will need to grasp exciting recent developments such as:

* Martian "blueberries": The Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars have found clues in tiny, blue spherical stones nicknamed "blueberries" that indicate liquid water was once abundant on the red planet.

* Water on Enceladus: The Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn has turned up evidence of liquid water just beneath the frozen surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Where there's water, there may be life.

* Is Pluto a planet? In August 2006, Pluto was demoted from the planetary status it had enjoyed since its discovery in 1930. Professor Filippenko discusses the persuasive reasons for this change—and his misgivings about how it was done.

* Exoplanets: Astronomers continue to find new planets orbiting other stars at a rate of about 20 per year. They are rapidly approaching the Holy Grail of planet hunters: extra-solar planets the size of Earth.

* Gamma-ray bursts: Thanks to NASA's Swift satellite, astronomers know more than ever about the most luminous and baffling events in the cosmos: gamma-ray bursts. They have found strong indications that many such bursts probably represent the birth cries of black holes.

* Dark energy: A mysterious force is causing the Universe to expand at an accelerating rate. The nature of this "dark energy" is now better understood thanks to recent observations that have narrowed down exactly when this speed-up began.

* Supermassive black holes: Once considered highly speculative, gigantic black holes are now known to be at the centers of most galaxies. These objects, from millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun, can produce vast jets of material moving outward at nearly the speed of light.

A Science for Everyone

As befits its subject matter, astronomy is perhaps the most diverse science there is. It teaches you about natural phenomena that we all experience, such as the seasons, rainbows, and phases of the Moon. It teaches you about tools of the trade, such as telescopes, spectrographs, and space probes. It teaches you about different areas of science, such as optics, physics, and chemistry. It also poses one of the most profound questions in the field of biology, namely, is there life elsewhere in the Universe?

Because astronomy has played a leading role in the development of science since antiquity, it is filled with key discoveries in the history of science, such as Copernicus's heliocentric model of the Solar System, Newton's universal law of gravitation, and Einstein's theory of relativity.

And, of course, astronomy serves as a field guide for understanding the night sky:

* The prominent star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion is a red supergiant, hundreds of times the diameter of the Sun.

* The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is orbited by a stellar corpse called a white dwarf, which points to the ultimate fate of the Sun.

* The beautiful Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova, whose explosion was observed by Chinese astronomers on July 4, 1054, and that at its left is an immensely dense, rapidly spinning neutron star.

At Home in the Universe

There is no doubt that we live in a golden age of astronomy. At this moment, space probes are on their way to new destinations, innovative new telescopes are on the drawing board, experiments are underway to test bold ideas about the cosmos, and powerful new tools for probing the nature of matter are about to come online. Astronomers everywhere are watching the skies with instruments of every size and type, searching for clues that will extend our knowledge of the Universe.

Armed with the wide-ranging and unified view of astronomy that this course offers, you will truly appreciate these future findings as they are announced. Moreover, you will feel at home in our wondrous Universe in a deeply satisfying way.

Lecture-Titles:

1.A Grand Tour of the Cosmos

2.The Rainbow Connection

3.Sunrise, Sunset

4.Bright Objects in the Night Sky

5.Fainter Phenomena in the Night Sky

6.Our Sky through Binoculars and Telescopes

7.The Celestial Sphere

8.The Reason for the Seasons

9.Lunar Phases and Eerie Lunar Eclipses

10.Glorious Total Solar Eclipses

11.More Eclipse Tales

12.Early Studies of the Solar System

13.The Geocentric Universe

14.Galileo and the Copernican Revolution

15.Refinements to the Heliocentric Model

16.On the Shoulders of Giants

17.Surveying Space and Time

18.Scale Models of the Universe

19.Light—The Supreme Informant

20.The Wave-Particle Duality of Light

21.The Colors of Stars

22.The Fingerprints of Atoms

23.Modern Telescopes

24.A Better Set of Eyes

25.Our Sun, the Nearest Star

26.The Earth, Third Rock from the Sun

27.Our Moon, Earth's Nearest Neighbor

28.Mercury and Venus

29.Of Mars and Martians

30.Jupiter and Its Amazing Moons

31.Magnificent Saturn

32.Uranus and Neptune, the Small Giants

33.Pluto and Its Cousins

34.Asteroids and Dwarf Planets

35.Comets—Gorgeous Primordial Snowballs

36.Catastrophic Collisions

37.The Formation of Planetary Systems

38.The Quest for Other Planetary Systems

39.Extra-Solar Planets Galore!

40.Life Beyond the Earth

41.The Search for Extraterrestrials

42.Special Relativity and Interstellar Travel

43.Stars—Distant Suns

44.The Intrinsic Brightnesses of Stars

45.The Diverse Sizes of Stars

46.Binary Stars and Stellar Masses

47.Star Clusters, Ages, and Remote Distances

48.How Stars Shine—Nature's Nuclear Reactors

49.Solar Neutrinos—Probes of the Sun's Core

50.Brown Dwarfs and Free-Floating Planets

51.Our Sun's Brilliant Future

52.White Dwarfs and Nova Eruptions

53.Exploding Stars—Celestial Fireworks!

54.White Dwarf Supernovae—Stealing to Explode

55.Core-Collapse Supernovae—Gravity Wins

56.The Brightest Supernova in Nearly 400 Years

57.The Corpses of Massive Stars

58.Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

59.Warping of Space and Time

60.Black Holes—Abandon Hope, Ye Who Enter

61.The Quest for Black Holes

62.Imagining the Journey to a Black Hole

63.Wormholes—Gateways to Other Universes?

64.Quantum Physics and Black-Hole Evaporation

65.Enigmatic Gamma-Ray Bursts

66.Birth Cries of Black Holes

67.Our Home—The Milky Way Galaxy

68.Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy

69.Other Galaxies—"Island Universes"

70.The Dark Side of Matter

71.Cosmology—The Really Big Picture

72.Expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang

73.Searching for Distant Galaxies

74.The Evolution of Galaxies

75.Active Galaxies and Quasars

76.Cosmic Powerhouses of the Distant Past

77.Supermassive Black Holes

78.Feeding the Monster

79.The Paradox of the Dark Night Sky

80.The Age of the Universe

81.When Geometry Is Destiny

82.The Mass Density of the Universe

83.Einstein's Biggest Blunder?

84.The Afterglow of the Big Bang

85.Ripples in the Cosmic Background Radiation

86.The Stuff of the Cosmos

87.Dark Energy—Quantum Fluctuations?

88.Dark Energy—Quintessence?

89.Grand Unification & Theories of Everything

90.Searching for Hidden Dimensions

91.The Shape, Size, and Fate of the Universe

92.In the Beginning

93.The Inflationary Universe

94.The Ultimate Free Lunch?

95.A Universe of Universes

96.Reflections on Life and the Cosmos

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