Lecture 36: Worlds in Comparison - The Terres...

The Gas Giants Jupiter and Saturn are the largest planets in the Solar System. Internally they are deep, heavy Hydrogen/Helium atmospheres on top of dense rock/ice cores without solid surfaces. What we see in our telescopes are just the tops of the clouds. This lecture describes ...  Show more

The Ice Giants Uranus and Neptune are the outermost major planets of our Solar System. Internally they small rocky cores surrounded by deep, slushy ice mantles and shallow hydrogen atmospheres, quite unlike the massive cores and deep metallic hydrogen mantles of Jupiter and Satur ...  Show more

Welcome to the Astronomy 161 Lecture Podcasts. This is a brief message from me explaining the podcasts, and welcoming new and old listeners. University. Lectures will begin on Wednesday, 2006 Sept 20, and run through Friday, 2006 December 1. New lectures will appear shortly befor ...  Show more

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 ...  Show more

Before we can begin our exploration of astronomy, we need to develop a common language for notating large numbers, and introduce the basic units of length, mass, and time that we will use throughout the quarter. We will first re-introduce the basic metric system, explaining how t ...  Show more

Why do stars shine? How long do they shine? This lecture describes the physics of stars on the main sequence, describes the mass-luminosity relation of main sequence stars, introduces nuclear fusion power and the nuclear fusion lifetimes of stars. From this we gain an important i ...  Show more