Astronomy. Reach for the stars.

This astronomy course will provide you with the context to understand current astronomical research, such as the recent exciting announcement of the detection of gravitational waves from coalescing black holes.

Through a series of lectures, demonstrations and the extraordinary images flowing from telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we will build a picture of each stage in the life cycle of a star.

Born in the interstellar gas clouds, stars enjoy a long maturity controlled by the mysteries of quantum mechanics, before dying, sometimes quietly and sometimes with unbelievable violence.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• describe the nature of stars and how they work
• appreciate how quantum mechanics governs the behaviour of stars
• describe the theories for the formation of stars and their solar systems, and the life cycle of stars
• identify the origin of the elements
• identify how astronomers use observations to construct theories of the universe
• put new discoveries, such as gravitational waves, into the context of current astronomical knowledge.

Content

Star types

We begin with a review of some basic concepts, then take a tour around the various types of stars.

Atoms and quantum mechanics: Introduction

We take a look at the smallest constituents of matter; as we will see, the strange realm of quantum mechanics and subatomic particles governs the behaviour o