Curso de Astronomía de la Universidad de Duke

Durante varias semanas he estado siguiendo el curso online de Astronomía de la Universidad de Duke. Es un curso interesante para cualquier interesado en profundizar en el conocimiento de nuestra afición. Lo recomiendo para cualquiera que tenga soltura con el inglés.

El curso consta de lecciones en vídeo (con subtítulos opcionales en inglés), documentos en PDF y documentos de Word. Es muy completo como se puede ver en el índice más abajo.

Se puede descargar desde los enlaces que aparecen aquí:
Curso de Astronomía de la Universidad de Duke

El índice del curso:

In this class, we will be studying, quite literally, everything in the universe. We will start with “classical” astronomy, describing the night sky and organizing what we see as was done in ancient times. We will then embark on a journey, starting here on Earth and progressing outward, to study the Solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the wonderful and strange objects we observe in deep space, such as black holes, quasars, and supernovae. We will end with some discussion of what scientists know today about the universe as a whole. Along the way we will introduce some of the methods, theoretical and experimental, that have been used to understand all of this, from Newton’s laws, through our understanding of light and matter, to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and from Galileo’s telescope to WMAP.

Course Syllabus
Week 1: Positional Astronomy (naked-eye Astronomy)
We will spend our first week familiarizing ourselves with descriptions of the positions and motions of celestial objects.

Week 2: Newton’s Universe
Newtonian physics revolutionized the way we understand our Universe. We will discuss Newton’s laws of mechanics, the conservation laws that follow from them, his theory of gravity and some applications to Astronomy, as well as some properties of radiation. The last clip will be a quick look at the features of quantum mechanics relevant to our course. This will be a particularly busy and challenging week, but hard work here will pay off later.

Week 3: Planets
We will not have time in this course to do any justice to the broad and exciting field of planetary science. We will spend the week on a general review of the properties and structure of our Solar System and our understanding of its origins and history. We will end with some discussion of the exciting discoveries over the past decade of many hundreds of extrasolar planets.

Week 4: Stars
What we know about stars and a bit about how we found out. We will begin with a quick review of the best-studied star of all, our Sun. We will then talk about classifications; H-R diagrams and main sequence stars; distance, mass, and size measurements; binaries; clusters; and stellar evolution through the main sequence

Week 5: Post-Main-Sequence Stars
Final stages of stellar evolution and stellar remnants. Giants, white dwarves, novae, variable stars, supernovae, neutron stars and pulsars.

Week 6: Relativity and Black Holes
We will spend most of this week acquiring an understanding of the special theory of relativity. We will then discuss the general theory in a qualitative way, and discuss its application to black holes, gravitational lensing, and other phenomena of interest.

Week 7: Galaxies
Galactic structure and classification. Active galactic nuclei, quasars and blazars. Galactic rotation curves and dark matter. Galaxy clusters and large-scale structure.

Week 8: Cosmology
What we can say about the universe as a whole. Hubble Expansion. Big bang cosmology. The cosmic microwave background. Recent determination of cosmological parameters. Early universe physics.

About the Instructor(s)
Ronen Plesser is an associate professor of physics and mathematics at Duke University. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1991, and held positions at Yale University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Weizmann Institute of Science before joining the Duke faculty in 1997. His research interests center on the interplay of geometry and physics in the context of string theory and particle physics. He has been teaching introductory astronomy at Duke since 2002.