Astronomy Daily Schedule Term 6

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Note: Unless otherwise noted, page numbers, equation numbers, and problem numbers refer to the 5th edition of The Cosmos by Pasachoff and Filippenko.

See also Daily Schedule Term 5

Week 8 — Chapters 10, and 11 — Our Sun and Other Stars

• Tuesday, May 11 — Our Sun – Guide to Reading and Problem Set 8
• Friday, May 14 — Other Stars — The HR diagram — Absolute Magnitude Handout — HR Plot Handout

Week 9 — Chapter 12 — Fusion and Nova

• Tuesday, May 18 — Chapter 12 — Fusion in the Interior of Stars — Reading and Discussion Guide and Problem Set 9
• Friday, May 21 — Second Midterm — Start Chapter 13 on the Death of Stars

Week 10 — Finish Chapter 13 and Start Chapter 14; Supernovas, Pulsars, Stellar Mass Black Holes, Schwarzschild Metric

• Tuesday, May 25 — Remainder of Chapter 13 — Supernovas, Neutron Stars, Pulsars
• Friday, May 28 — Reading: Start Chapter 14 on Black Holes, Sections 14.1 to 14.6 — Supplementary Reading: Taylor and Wheeler, Exploring Black Holes, pp. 2-16 to 2-30

Week 11 — Chapters 14 and 15 — Black Holes, The Milky Way

• Tuesday, June 1 — Finish Chapter 14 on Black Holes (Supermassive Black Holes, Gravitational Wave Detection) — Excellent explanation by Veritasium of what a black hole accretion disk looks like — Problem Set 10
• Friday, June 4 — Read all of Chapter 15 on Our Galaxy with more than 100 billion stars — Density wave theory animation

Week 12 — Chapters 16, and 17 — Hubble’s Expanding Universe, Other Galaxies, Gravitational Lensing, Quasars, Active Galactic Nuclei

• Tuesday, June 8 — Chapter 16: More than 100 billion galaxies — Hubble’s 1925 paper — Hubble’s 1929 paper — Problem Set 11 — Worksheet on Understanding Hubble’s Law
• Friday, June 11 — A Deeper Dive on Gravitational Lensing — Video on Deflection of starlight — Chapter 17: Quasars, Active Galactic Nuclei — Event Horizon Telescope image of supermassive black hole in M87

Week 13 — Chapter 18 — Cosmology — Third Midterm

• Tuesday, June 15 — Chapter 18 — General Relativity and the Expanding Universe — The New Standard Candle: Type 1a Supernovae and Modern Measurements of Hubble’s Law — The Evidence for Dark Matter and Dark Energy on Cosmological Scales — Problem Set 12 — High-Z supernovae results, Riess et al 1998
• Friday, June 18 —Third Midterm (Final) — Penzias and Wilson Discover Black-Body Radiation of 3000K with z=1000 — Penzias and Wilson, 1965

Week 14 — Chapter 19 — The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation — Special Projects

• Tuesday, June 22 — Finish Chapter 19 — Echoes of the Big Bang — Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson, 1965 — The Universe when it was Only 380,000 Years Old — Density Fluctuations in the Early Universe — The Inflationary Universe — Discuss Project Writeups and Results — Chen, Lunar Eclipse and Two-Day Old Moon — Lucia, Wild Duck Open Cluster — Alice and Declan, Veil Nebula