TOPICS:
History
General Info
Explaining the Sky
Scale
Math Review
Gravity
Light, Atoms, Spectra
Blackbodies
Forces & Particles
Stars and Stellar Evolution
Cepheids
Distance Scales
The Milky Way
Galactic Rotation, Dark Matter
Hubble Law, Expansion
Dark Energy
Galaxy Distribution
The Early Universe and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
The Very Early Universe
The Cosmic Microwave Background
Relativity and Black Holes
Inflation
Origin of Structure
Reionization
Images and Skywatching
Excellent history of astronomy up to the time of Galileo
New interactive history of cosmology website from the American Institute of Physics
The Story Behind the Science -- bringing science and scientists to life!
Click below for some wonderful biographies; here is the main index of the website.
Ptolemy
Hipparchus
Copernicus
Kepler
Brahe*
Galileo
Newton
Halley
*Click on the link "Tycho Brahe's Nose" for a more "colorful" Tycho Brahe page, including his nose, his pet moose and his death.
The Shapley-Curtis Debate (for later in the semester)
GOOD GENERAL WEBSITES WITH RELEVANT MATERIAL
George Rieke's online class notes - excellent!
General astronomy animations and figures
Online notes from astronomy class at U. Oregon
A good summary page of modern cosmology
EXPLAINING THE SKY: COPERNICUS VS. ARISTOTLE & PTOLEMY
Schematic of what retrograde motion looks like. Double-click the image to start.
What it really looks like, shown here when Jupiter and Saturn happened to be located in the same part of the sky.
Retrograde Motion - Ptolemy's explanation
Retrograde Motion - Copernicus' explanation
Refresher on Scientific Notation
Here's an actual SCALE MODEL of the solar system that was constructed along Route 1 in Maine. The scale is 1 mile=1 AU. (1 AU = the distance from the Earth to the Sun = 93 million miles = 150 million km.) At this scale, the nearest star would be beyond the real orbit of the moon!
MATH REVIEW; ANGLES & PARALLAX
Explanation of distances in astronomy, and parallax
An Interactive applet for Kepler's Laws, Retrograde Motion, Inner Planet Phases, and more...
LIGHT, ATOMS & SPECTRA
Transverse and Longitudinal Waves
The Rutherford Experiment:
if
positive charge were evenly spread throughout an atom
if
the positive charge were concentrated in a tiny nucleus
An image of the Orion Nebula (red=hydrogen gas!)
Rieke page on Doppler Effect and spectra
Doppler effect in 30 mph Volvo from Exploratorium
Blackbodies at different temperatures
Equipartition of energy explanation - scroll down to "Temperature"
blowup of the chart of particles and interactions in the stairwell.
Hydrostatic Equilibrium demonstration
Rieke Star formation page with animations
The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram
Sun/White Dwarf size comparison
High-mass core -- Type II SN precursor
Why an iron core means good-bye
Type II Supernova explosion cartoon
White Dwarf/Neutron Star size comparison
Cepheid variable stars on the HR Diagram
All about Delta Cephei and Cepheid variables
Schematic Cepheid light curves at different P
The Period-Luminosity relation
Demonstration of the Cepheid Preiod-Luminosity relation
Hunting for Cepheid Variables in M100
Michael Richmond's page on the extragalactic distance scale
One version of the extragalactic distance ladder
Beautiful view of the Milky Way
Jim Schombert's Galaxy page (an excellent resource)
Cornell web page on the Milky Way
Milky Way lecture from Adam Frank at U. Rochester
Rieke web page on The Milky Way as a galaxy
Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy
Shapley's globular cluster distribution
Animation of density waves in a galaxy
Spiral density waves and other interesting info- scroll down for movie
GALACTIC ROTATION AND DARK MATTER
Animation of Doppler-shifted light from a rotating galaxy
The Story Behind the Science: Dark Matter
THE HUBBLE LAW AND THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE
The Shapley-Curtis Debate and the Scale of the Universe main page
three-paragraph summary
Hubble's original graph from 1929
Modern Hubble Diagram with Type Ia SN
Michael Richmond's page on the extragalactic distance scale
Animation of galaxy distances and velocities
Discovery of galaxies and their distances (Rieke)
Hubble's Law "raisin bread" animation
Everyone thinks they're at the center
Discovery of galaxies and their distances (Rieke)
Animation of the Cosmological Redshift
The Hubble Time (age of the Universe)
The Runaway Universe NOVA website
Rieke page on galaxy clustering
Pie slice from real SDSS survey
THE EARLY UNIVERSE, BIG BANG NUCLEOSYNTHESIS, EFFECTS OF REDSHIFT
R. Pogge's page on "Fundamental Tests of the Big Bang"
R. Pogge's page on "The First Three Minutes"
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis graph
My notes on thermal equilibrium
My notes on the relationship between observed properties and redshift
Movie showing redshift with expansion
An Interactive Tour Throught the Big Bang
My notes on the timetable of the universe
Comparison of matter and radiation densities
Inflation increases R(t) exponentially!
Rieke page on Eras in the The Early Universe and Nucleosynthesis
Unification of Forces schematic
Another force unification schematic
Limits on our ability to observe force unification (the LHC will move it toward the "Electroweak theory" line)
THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND
(see links under "BLACKBODIES" above to remind yourselves about blackbody (Planck) radiation)
Rieke's page on the CMB anisotropies
The Story Behind the Science: The Cosmic Microwave Background
GENERAL RELATIVITY and BLACK HOLES
The Equivalence Principle
Mercury precession animation: Newton
vs. Einstein
Gravitational Bending of Starlight diagram
Gravitational Lensing Applet (it's fun!)
Gravitational Bending of Starlight animation
Real-World Relativity: the GPS System
Gravitational redshift animation
animation of Binary Pulsar Gravitational Radiation
The Story Behind the Science: Black Holes
Light bending (from http://atropos.as.arizona.edu/aiz/teaching/xiaohui.html)
Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background
CMB tutorial
Gravitational instability - seeds top view
EXCELLENT intro to the CMB oscillations
Thermal history leads to acoustic oscillations
gas density evolution Spatial inhomogeneity becomes angular anisotropy
Fluctuation size and geometry movie
How baryon density, ΩB, affects the power spectrum
How total matter density, Ω0h2, affects the power spectrum
WMAP fingerprint matching movie
Omega shouldn't be ~1
The false vacuum
The true vacuum
The resulting observable universe
Guth discusses inflation (part 1)
Guth discusses inflation (part 2)
A very readable explanation of inflation by Guth himself (from 13 years ago, and anticipating the results from COBE and WMAP, but still relevant)
Structure Simulations and Observations
Gas density evolution animation with cosmological constant (from Martin White's page - the universe's expansion has been "scaled out" for ease of viewing)
CDM simulation pie slice of SDSS survey
Pie slice from real SDSS survey
Dark Matter serves as scaffold for structure
Structure evolution movie from WMAP
Reionization from http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect20/480px-Reion_diagram.jpg
Reionization explanation from http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~george/reion/discovicon.jpg
Reionization simulation (from http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~ritzervj/Research/Reionization.html)
Large-scale ionization structure 100 Mpc co-moving cube with 4.2 billion particles
Ned Wright's Lyman Alpha Forest explanation
The Globe at Night - 2012, a worldwide effort to map and raise awareness of light pollution
Hubble Space Telescope Latest
Information
SKYLIGHTS: Weekly Astronomy News & Images
Stars:
Portraits of Stars and Their Constellations
Sky & Telescope Interactive Star Charts
Back to Astronomy 330 home page
Structure formation animation from initial fluctuations (from Martin White's page - the universe's expansion has been "scaled out" for ease of viewing)
You are visitor , courtesy of
at www.digits.com
Back to Astronomy 330 syllabus.