Lecture 17: On the Shoulders of Giants: Isaac...

What is Gravity? Starting with the properties of falling bodies first formulated by Galileo, Newton applied his three laws of motion to the problem of Universal Gravitation. Newtonian Gravity is a mutually attractive force that acts at a distance between any two massive bodies. I ...  Show more

Why do Kepler's Laws work? In this lecture I will describe Newton's generalization of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion so that they will apply to any two massive bodies orbiting around their common center of mass. I will introduce families of open and closed orbits, the circular ...  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