Lecture 29: The Children of Saturn

Why is the Earth habitable today but Venus and Mars not? This lecture explores the question of planetary habitability from the perspective of the stability of liquid water on the surface of planetary bodies. We will see how the amount of sunlight and the greenhouse effect in the ...  عرض المزيد

What are the observed properties of stars? This lecture is a quick review of the basic observational properties of stars, introducing luminosity, spectral classification, the luminosity-radius-temperature relation, and the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. This sets up the empir ...  عرض المزيد

How can we search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and what are we looking for? This second part of a 2-part lecture picks up where we left off yesterday by examining SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, and reviews what we might look for and how. We will use thi ...  عرض المزيد

What is Astronomy? What is Science? What is the course all about? Brief introductory remarks after going over course mechanics on the first day of Astronomy 161 for Autumn Quarter 2007. Recorded 2007 Sep 19 in 1000 McPherson Lab on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University ...  عرض المزيد

Are we alone in the Universe? This lecture explores the question of how we might go about finding life on planets around other stars. Rather than talking about speculative ideas, like the Drake Equation or SETI, I am instead taking the approach of posing it as a problem of what t ...  عرض المزيد