Elementary Astronomy

Catalog description

ASTRO 10 Elementary Astronomy) (GN) (BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. Students who have passed ASTRO, 1, ASTRO 5 , ASTRO 6 , or ASTRO 7N may not take this course for credit. Students may not receive General Education credit for ASTRO 10 unless they also take ASTRO 11 . Overview of modern understanding of the astronomical universe. ASTRO 10 is an introductory course for non-science majors. It provides a broad introduction to Astronomy with qualitative descriptions of the dazzling and varied contents of the universe including planets, the Sun and other stars, exoplanets, red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, supernovae, galaxies, dark matter, and more. The course will explore how these objects form and change and interact, how the whole whole universe formed and changes (cosmology), and where Earth fits in the vast scheme of things. Students will learn how our relative place, orientation, and motion in space dictate our changing view of the sky (daily and yearly sky motions, phases of the moon) and conditions on Earth (arctic, tropics, and seasonal changes). Descriptions will build upon the basic physics of gravity, light, and atoms, and will be discussed in the context of the process of science as a robust and self-correcting way of learning and knowing that relies on making and testing predictions by gathering evidence. The goal of this course is to cover most of the areas of modern astronomy at a level which requires only basic mathematics.