Welcome!

Introductions

Preview: The Big Picture

• Building Cosmological Muscles: Physics and Astronomy
  • Newtonian motion, gravity
  • Telescopes: Hubble--the scope, Chandra's X-ray vision, WMAP and cosmic microwaves
  • From inner space to outer space: Newton overthrown
    quantum mechanics + relativity = antimatter! as found here and here
  • Matter, space, and time: General Relativity overthrows Newtonian gravity
    gravitational light bending

• Galaxies
  • The Milky Way: optical view
  • Milky Way Center:
    stellar orbits around a supermassive black hole
  • other spirals and their origin
    
  • active galactic nuclei

• Cosmology
  • Hubble--the man and the expansion of the universe
  • the Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field
  • The Big Bang
  • evidence for dark energy
    deep and prizeworthy new questions
  • particle dark matter and the early universe:
    evidence, candidates, direct searches
  • cosmic microwave background
  • big bang nucleosynthesis
    Neil Armstrong and Apollo's role in understanding the first three minutes
  • formation of the first structures and the first stars

Business: Course Syllabus