This course focuses on three particularly interesting areas of astronomy that are advancing very rapidly: Extra-Solar Planets, Black Holes, and Dark Energy. Particular attention is paid to current projects that promise to improve our understanding significantly over the next few years. The course explores not just what is known, but what is currently not known, and how astronomers are going about trying to find out.

Lectures included in the playlist above:

  1. Introduction
  2. Planetary Orbits
  3. Our Solar System and the Pluto Problem
  4. Discovering Exoplanets: Hot Jupiters
  5. Planetary Transits
  6. Microlensing, Astrometry and Other Methods
  7. Direct Imaging of Exoplanets
  8. Introduction to Black Holes
  9. Special and General Relativity
  10. Tests of Relativity
  11. Special and General Relativity (cont.)
  12. Stellar Mass Black Holes
  13. Stellar Mass Black Holes (cont.)
  14. Pulsars
  15. Supermassive Black Holes
  16. Hubble’s Law and the Big Bang
  17. Hubble’s Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
  18. Hubble’s Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
  19. Omega and the End of the Universe
  20. Dark Matter
  21. Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe and the Big Rip
  22. Supernovae
  23. Other Constraints: The Cosmic Microwave Background
  24. The Multiverse and Theories of Everything