Course Description: 

The universe is a big place, and it’s been around for a long time. It contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with up to hundreds of billions of stars. Most of those stars appear to be circled by planets. One planet around one star in one galaxy hosts millions of species of living organisms, and one of those species — humankind — has developed the capacity to understand all this. In this course, we’ll explore our place in space and time, from Earth to the edge of the known universe, and from the Big Bang through the present to the distant future. We’ll consider not only what we know about the universe, but how we know it. We’ll also look at some of the biggest questions in astronomy and at how astronomers are working to answer them.

 

Among the topics we’ll cover are the fundamentals of stargazing, including how to find your way around the night sky and what you can see with your eyes, with binoculars, and with telescopes; scales of size and distance in the cosmos; constituents of the universe, including planets, stars, galaxies, asteroids, comets, and other species of the astronomical zoo; the history of the universe, the Milky Way galaxy, and our solar system; the life cycles of stars; the question of life beyond Earth; and the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

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