Great courses

96 lectures, 30 min. each

Lectures designed to provide a non-technical description of modern astronomy, including the structure and evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. The new discoveries reported in the 2003 course are integrated and recent findings (through mid-2006) are included

Course no. 1810

Lectures delivered by Alex Filippenko

DVD

Pt. 1. Disc 1.

A grand tour of the cosmos ; Rainbow connection ; Sunrise, sunset ; Bright objects in the night sky ; Fainter phenomena in the night sky ; Our sky through binoculars and telescopes --

Disc 2.

Celestial sphere ; Reason for the seasons ; Lunar phases and eerie lunar eclipses ; Glorious total solar eclipses ; More eclipse tales ; Early studies of the solar system

Pt. 2. Disc 3.

Geocentric universe ; Galileo and the Copernican revolution ; Refinements to the heliocentric model ; On the shoulders of giants ; Surveying space and time ; Scale models of the universe --

Disc 4.

Light: the supreme informant ; Wave-particle duality of light ; Colors of stars ; Fingerprints of atoms ; Modern telescopes ; A better set of eyes

Pt. 3. Disc 5.

Our sun, the nearest star ; Earth, third rock from the sun ; Our moon, Earth's nearest neighbor ; Mercury and Venus ; Of Mars and martians ; Jupiter and its amazing moons --

Disc 6.

Magnificent Saturn ; Uranus and Neptune, the small giants ; Pluto and its cousins ; Asteroids and dwarf planets ; Comets: gorgeous pimordial snowballs ; Catastrophic collisons

Pt. 4. Disc 7.

Formation of planetary systems ; Quest for other planetary systems ; Extra-solar planets galore ; Life beyond the Earth ; Search for extraterrestrials ; Special relativity and interstellar travel --

Disc 8.

Stars: distant suns ; Intrinsic brightnesses of stars ; Diverse sizes of stars ; Binary stars and stellar masses ; Star clusters, ages, and remote distances ; How stars shine: nature's nuclear reactors

Pt. 5. Disc 9.

Solar neutrinos: probes of the sun's core ; Brown dwarfs and free-floating planets ; Our sun's briliant future ; White dwarfs and nova eruptions ; Exploding stars: celestial fireworks ; White dwarf supernovae: stealing to explode --

Disc 10.

Core-collapse supernovae: gravity wins ; Brightest supernova in nearly 400 years ; Corpses of massive stars ; Einstein's general theory of relativitiy ; Warping of space and time ; Black holes: abandon hope, ye who enter

Pt. 6. Disc 11.

Quest for black holes ; Imagining the journey to a black hole ; Wormholes: gateways to other universes? ; Quantum physics and black-hole evaporation ; Enigmatic gamma-ray bursts ; Birth cries of black holes --

Disc 12.

Our home: the Milky Way Galaxy ; Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy ; Other galaxies: "Island universes" ; Dark side of matter ; Cosmology: the really big picture ; Expansion of the universe and the big bang

Pt. 7. Disc 13.

Searching for distant galaxies ; Evolution of galaxies ; Active galaxies and quasars ; Cosmic powerhouses of the distant past ; Supermassive black holes ; Feeding the monster --

Disc 14.

Paradox of the dark night sky ; Age of the universe ; When geometry is destiny ; Mass density of the universe ; Einstein's biggest blunder? ; Afterglow of the big bang

Pt. 8. Disc 15.

Ripples in the cosmic background radiation ; Stuff of the cosmos ; Dark energy: quantum fluctuations? ; Dark energy: quintessence? ; Grand unification & theories of everything ; Searching for hidden dimensions --

Disc 16.

Shape, size, and fate of the universe ; In the beginning ; Inflationary universe ; Ultimate free lunch? ; A universe of universes ; Reflections on life and the cosmos