Lecture 12: The Wanderers

What are the origins of the Geocentric and Heliocentric models put foward to explain planetary motion? This lecture begins a new unit that will chart the rise of our modern view of the solar system by reviewing the highly influential work by Greek and Roman philosophers who elabo ...  Show more

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus revived Aristarchus' Heliocentric System in an attempt to rid Ptolemy's geocentric system of the un-Aristotelian idea of the Equant. He desired to create a model of the planets that would please the mind as well as preserving appearances. Rather than ...  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