Search for Life in the Universe

Freshman Seminar 131, Mathey College

Interesting links of relevance to this course

Please let me know if there are other relevant links I should put here.

General Astronomy References:

  • Princeton University Observatory and Library
  • Astronomy HyperText Book , which includes links to course notes of some relevance to our course.
  • Home page of Astro 203, the Introductory Astrophysics course I taught in Spring 1996. This includes detailed class notes.
  • The Galaxy Gallery: Messier Objects A source of beautiful astronomical pictures.
  • Astronomical Image Library. You can find pictures of essentially any astronomical source here.
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive; loaded with beautiful pictures.
  • Home page of the Space Telescope Science Institute. Look here for all kinds of nifty things related to the Hubble Space Telescope.

    Pages with lots of links to the astronomical world; good places to start searching for specific information:

  • The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Page of links compiled by the Planetary Society; there is a lot here.
  • Comprehensive list of astronomy links sorted by category.
  • Astrophysics in Cyberspace Lots of stuff about Mars, extrasolar planets, all kinds of goodies.
  • Windows to the Universe, developed by the University of Michigan, with information about Earth and Space Sciences; seems a bit elementary.

    NASA and related sites:

  • NASA's home page
  • The Planets Home page. A great place to start for armchair exploration of the solar system! Does not have much in the way of links to external resources.
  • Solar System Home Page.
  • NASA's Solar System photo album,, full of great pictures.
  • The Comets Home page
  • Links to all things Martian.
  • The Mars Pathfinder Home Page
  • The Mars Global Surveyor Home Page
  • Voyager's tour of the outer solar system.
  • Galileo's mission to Jupiter
  • Julien's home page on Europa.
  • Martian Meteorites and the search for life.
  • Robert Zubrin's Headquarters for the Direct Manned Mars Mission.
  • Everything you wanted to know about Martian Meteorites.
  • T.C. Onstott's page about deep subsurface bacteria.
  • NASA's Exobiology Site.
  • NASA's Astrobiology site.
  • Searching for Extra-Solar Planets, from Geoff Marcy's group at San Francisco State University.
  • The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

    The Search for Extraterrestrial Life:

  • SETI Institute This includes quite a bit of useful information, and links to the entire SETI research community.
  • The Planetary Society, source for general information about space exploration, including much of relevance for this course.
  • Headquarters for the Mars Society, a bunch of Mars enthusiasts.
  • Stephen Hawking's Life in the Universe Home page; spotty, but with some good links.
  • The Astrobiology Web.
  • Contact, the movie, home page.
  • The Panspermia home page.
  • The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home, an effort to use screensavers to help process data taken for the SETI program.
  • Home page for a similar course taught at U. Texas by Ethan Vishniac.

    Biology, Geology, etc.

  • Yahoo is an excellent place to start when starting a search for a topic you know little about. This is what I've done to find these links.
  • Yahoo's Biology links.
  • Paleontology resources on the Web.
  • More geology links than you know what to do with.
  • Meteorology links from Yahoo; a good place to start for studies of the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
  • Ecology home page with lots of links.
  • Small Comets, a la Louis Frank.

    Out in left field:

  • The Sky is falling! Links to sites discussing cosmic catastrophes of various sorts.
  • UFO believers' sites
  • James Randi, professional skeptic
  • The Skeptical Inquirer, a journal devoted to debunking.

    Web sites of useful journals:

  • Sky and Telescope. An excellent source of astronomical news, and articles on subjects relevant to the course.
  • Astronomy, another astronomical journal orented towards amateurs.
  • Scientific American. Also full of relevant articles.
  • Doug Ingram has put together a list of recent Scientific American articles of use to astronomers. Useful for term papers!
  • Science News. Their articles are short, and very up-to-date.
    This file was constructed by Michael Strauss; send me mail.