Astro C10: Astronomy

In my experience, Astronomy C10 with Alex Fillipenko is, by quite a wide margin, the most highly recommended ‘for-fun’ course to take at Berkeley.

These notes are an attempt to condense a semester’s worth of content into a digestible set of notes that take away the main ideas from the course while preserving as much of Alex’s contagious excitement for astronomy. I still highly recommend taking the course itself, as it is impossible to convey everything here. But if you are unable to do so, I hope you enjoy these notes as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Prerequisites #

Although there are no officially listed prerequisites for Astro C10, it will be far easier to follow its content with a general understanding of algebra and geometry, notably:

• Scientific notation,
• Units and unit conversion, specifically with SI units,
• Ratios and proportionality,
• Surface area and volume, especially of spheres,
• Graphing variables as a function of another variable.

A Grand Tour of the Cosmos #

In these notes, we will explore:

• Massive scales of distance and time;
• Light, the main tool used to study the universe;
• Telescopes;
• Celestial phenomenon, such as the phases of the moon, solar eclipses, and the rotation of planets;
• Newton’s Laws of Motion and how they brought together seemingly unrelated phenomena;
• Our solar system, its planets, and their moons;
• The Kuiper Belt, including dwarf planets like Pluto;
• Comets, meteors, and their consequences;
• Other worlds outside our solar system, including those that are potentially habitable;
• The inner workings of the Sun, and how elements are created;
• The evolution of stars and galaxies;
• The birth and death of stars: nebulae and supernovae;
• Black holes, gravity, and wormholes;
• Cosmology: the study of the origins and evolution of the Universe;
• The shape of the universe, and the possibility of multiverses,
• The spectra of elements, and how spectroscopy lets us deduce what distant stars are made of;
• The Doppler effect and redshift, and how they reveal the motion of celestial objects;
• Blackbody radiation and what the brightness, color, and size of a star tell us about it;
• Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion, and the shift from geocentric to heliocentric models;
• Tides, seasons, earthshine, and other consequences of the Earth-Moon-Sun system;
• The asteroid belt, the Roche limit, and how Saturn got its rings;
• Stellar classification and the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram;
• Neutron stars, pulsars, and the remnants left behind by supernovae;
• Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravitational lensing, and gravitational waves;
• Galaxies, including the structure of the Milky Way and the nature of quasars;
• Dark matter, dark energy, and what most of the universe is actually made of;
• The expansion of the universe, Hubble’s Law, and the accelerating cosmos;
• The Big Bang, cosmic inflation, and the cosmic microwave background;
• The search for extraterrestrial life and the Drake equation;
• The four fundamental forces and the search for a Theory of Everything.