This course does not follow the books slavishly. Thus there will be many topics that the books will cover in much more detail than we will in the course (the converse is also true, especially near the end of the course). These notes try to give you a sense of how to read the books: which parts you should feel familiar with, and which parts we will not emphasize (of course, please feel free to read them if they look interesting! However, you are not responsible for their content). These notes will be updated as we continue through the semester. Bennett et al is a traditional textbook, and will be your primary reference throughout the course. Gott's book is a popular exposition of much of the material covered in the last third of the class. Gott's book has essentially no mathematics or equations, but emphasizes the basic physical concepts that we'll find ourselves using throughout the course. It is not a textbook, and therefore should not be read as such; read it as you would read any book for pleasure.

Each chapter of Bennett et al ends with a series of study guides; these are more or less useful. The "Big Picture" is a very effective capsule summary of the chapter, while the "summary of key concepts" will be a useful guide to make sure you've absorbed the basic ideas presented in each Chapter.

The appendices of the book contain further useful quantities, including useful constants and formulas. Appendix C discusses a variety of mathematical skills. You are responsible for the material here (you will be using it throughout the course), so be sure to come talk to us if you don't understand any of it.

For the first two weeks of the course, you will want to read Chapters 1-5 in The Cosmic Perspective. Also, read the article, Does 'life' have a definition?, by Cleland and Chyba (available on E-reserves from Blackboard) for the first lecture. Go to the blackboard site for this course and click on E-Reserves (on the menu on the left) to find it. More details lecture by lecture will appear as the course progresses; check this page often.

And do read the Cleland and Chyba article on the definition of life; go to the Blackboard site for this course, and click on E-Reserves.

Lecture #2. You should have read all of Chapter 1 thus far, although we haven't discussed all the material in there yet. Read Section 2.1 (which describes the motions of stars through the night). We will not discuss many of the details in the remainder of the chapter, but read through it. Do read Section 2.4, which describes the motions of the planets through the sky, and the effects of parallax. Go onto read Chapter 3, and especially Section 3.2 on Greek astronomy. Eratosthenes' measurement of the radius of the Earth is described on page 68, and Aristotle's ideas are very briefly described on page 71. Section 3.3 discusses the realization by Copernicus that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System, and also discusses Kepler's Three Laws (which you'll need for doing Homework 1). We'll be discussing some of the issues in Section 3.4 in another lecture or so.

Lectures #3 and #4. Read Mathematical Insight 2.1 (page 32), which discusses the small-angle formula. Note that the form given here refers to angles in degrees. If you measure angles in radians (as it was presented in class), the formula becomes much simpler.

The book doesn't get around to discussing parallax and parsecs until much later, in Section 15.1 (especially pages 522 and 523). Read that; the inverse square law also discussed there is something we'll get to soon.

You should have read all of Sections 3.2-3.4 by now. You are not responsible for the details of coordinate systems in the sky, but do read Section S1.2 if you'd like to learn more. Read Section 4.1 on what we mean by velocity, acceleration, force, and so on. Section 4.2 discusses Newton's Laws of Motion. We'll discuss the material in Section 4.3 next time, but for now, skip ahead to Section 4.4, which discusses the law of gravity. Mathematical insight 4.3 (page 137) introduces something called "Newton's Version of Kepler's Third Law", you'll notice that the book wimps out completely in explaining *how* Newton explains Kepler's Third Law (as we are now doing in class). Do read Section 4.5; we haven't covered all the material yet, but we're getting there.

Lecture #5. You should have read all of Chapter 4 by now. You are not responsible for the material on linear and angular momentum (pages 128-129) and we'll get to E=mc^2 (page 133) later in the course. Newton's form of Kepler's Third Law is given on page 137 (although notice that it isn't derived, but simply stated here). But do note that it is more general here than we presented in class. We assumed that one object is orbiting around a second, much more massive object; that second object can be assumed for most purposes to be fixed. If the two objects are comparable in mass, however, this is no longer the case, and the more general form given in the text holds.

We have not yet discussed the material on pages 138-141. Page 142-143 ("why do all objects fall at the same rate?") is material you are responsible for.

Go on to read Chapter 5. We are about to talk about light, so do read Sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.4 for next time. Section 5.3 describes the nature of atoms and nuclei; read it now. Radioactivity and the decay of atoms are discussed in Section 8.5; jump ahead and read pages 248-250 (we'll go into much more detail than the text does here).

Lecture #6. You should have read most of Chapter 5 by now. Pay special attention to the discussion of the laws of thermal (blackbody) radiation (pages 167-170).

In this and the subsequent lectures, we've hopped around the Solar System, although we certainly haven't come close to describing it in full. In any case, read Chapter 7 for an overview of the subject. We touched upon many of the issues discussed in Chapter 9 (Planetary Geology); you'll find descriptions of plate tectonics on Earth, the Moon's surface, volcanism, and other things we've talked about, although (as is often the case), there are many details in lecture not mentioned in the text, and vice-versa.

Lecture #7. Start reading Chapter 10, planetary atmospheres, especially section 10.1. The formulas we derived in class for the equilibrium temperature of a planet are given in Mathematical Insight 10.1 (page 302), although notice that the text simply writes down the formula with no clear explanation of where it came from. You'll find there a qualitative description of the greenhouse effect; we went into appreciably more detail in class. We didn't have much time to discuss the atmospheres of Mars and Venus in detail, but do take a look at Sections 10.4 and 10.5 if you're interested. And Section 10.6 describes the carbon dioxide cycle, discussed in some detail in class. There is also a discussion there of global warming. Also, go back to Section 9.4, and read about the now overwhelming evidence that Mars once had abundant water on its surface.

Lecture #8. (page numbers below are off by at least 4 pages -- we'll fix it today) Chris Chyba and his student Kevin Hand have written a comprehensive review article which nicely parallels many of the issues we've talked about here. It was published in the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and you can find it on the web here; you can also find it in a link off the blackboard e-reserves for this course. The article discusses many of the themes that have been brought up through all of Prof. Chyba's lectures, especially this lecture.

Europa and its liquid ocean, and the effects of tidal heating, are discussion in Chapter 11; read in particular pages 342-344. The search for extraterrestrial life is discussed in Chapter 24; you will recognize many of the topics discussed there. Note that the Drake Equation is written down in a different form than presented in class, and you are not responsible here for the details.

Lecture #9 started our discussion of stars; for this, you want to read essentially all of Chapter 15 (we will come back to Chapter 14 in another lecture or two). Section 15.1 discusses the inverse square law relating brightness and luminosity, and the parallax. Note that the textbook wimps out in Mathematical Insight 15.2, and never introduces radians at all (which is really the right way to think about this).

We will not discuss the magnitude scale (Mathematical Insight 15.3 and page 523) in this course; it is an interesting, but unnecessary bit of historical baggage which we need not use. We will only touch briefly upon binary stars and the measurement of their masses (page 527-529). The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (Section 15.2) will occupy us in the next lecture.

Note that the textbook shows the spectra of stars in a rather different format from the way we have done so. They show it as a colored band (see the figure on Page 527), representing the different wavelengths, with dark lines representing the absorption lines. I prefer the graphical representation; it is more precise, easier to read, shows directly how much light of different wavelengths is emitted, and is actually what professional astronomers use.

Finally, go back to Chapter 2, and read Mathematical Insight 2.1, which discusses the relationship between angular size, physical size, and distance (but note, that again, it refuses to introduce the concept of radians, making life more difficult than it need be).

The material for Lecture 10 is mostly covered in Chapter 14. Read Section 14.1, but don't feel responsible for the details of the structure of the Sun, especially on the surface (i.e., you are not responsible for all the details in Figure 14.3 on page 497). We will also not talk about the radiation zone and the convection zone. Do read Section 14.2, about nuclear fusion, carefully. You are not responsible for the details of the proton-proton chain, as described in page 484. Do read about the solar neutrino problem on page 506. You are not responsible for the material in Section 14.3.

Lecture 11: You have already read most of the material for this lecture in Chapter 15. The book goes into more detail than we have done about the different types of binary stars, and how one uses each type to measure masses of stars.

Go back to Section 5.5 to read about Doppler shift. Chapter 13 is devoted to the discussion of planets around other stars. Read all of Section 13.1 and 13.2; note that we didn't talk about the astrometric technique in class. We didn't talk at all about the formation of the solar system or other planetary systems, so you are not responsible for the material in Section 13.3. Section 13.4 describes some of the future missions designed to search for planets.

Brown dwarfs, and the upper limit of the masses of main sequence stars, are discussed briefly in Section 16.3. We will touch upon the remaining issues in Section 16 briefly later in the course. Start reading Chapter 17, which discusses the evolution of low-mass and high-mass stars beyond the main sequence (red giants, planetary nebulae, supernovae, and all that). We will continue that discussion next time.

Lecture 12:

We discussed the evolution of stars in detail; please read Sections 17.1-17.3. You'll notice that this touches upon many details we didn't discuss, which you are not responsible for. We didn't touch at all on the material of Section 17.4; you can skip it.

We will start talking about the material in Chapters 18 and 19 in the next lecture, if you want to get ahead. But take a look now at Section 18.4, which briefly describes gamma-ray bursts.

Lecture 13: Degeneracy pressure is described in Sections S4.3 and S4.4 in the textbook (pages 483-490). This goes into more detail than we did in class, and you are not responsible for the details here.

Next, hop ahead to Chapter 18. Read about white dwarfs in Section 18.1. Neutron stars are described in Section 18.2. As we said in lecture, we'll come back to black holes (Section 18.3) later in the course.

Lecture 14: Hop back to Chapter 16, which describes the ISM. Focus on Section 16.1, and in particular the material through page 547.

Next, go to Chapter 19.1 of the text, which will occupy us in the next lecture. But do read Section 19.2, which describes the cycle of gas from stars to the interstellar medium, and back to stars. As is often the case, the text goes into far more detail than we will have time to cover in this course. Section 20.1 talks about the basic properties of galaxies. We didn't talk about lenticular galaxies, nor did we cover barred galaxies and the "tuning fork diagram" (Figure 20.8 on page 621. Section 20.2 talks about the measurement of distances to galaxies; we discussed this briefly, and will discuss it in a bit more detail in the next lecture.

Lecture 15: Read the section on dark matter in galaxies; Section 22.2 through page 685. We didn't talk about mass-to-light ratios (mathematical insight 22.1).) Then hop back to Chapter 20, especially Section 20.3, which discusses the Hubble Law.

Read all of Chapter S2 (starting page 425) of Bennett et al.; we have, or soon will have, covered all the material discussed here. I will just point that the mathematical insight, S2.3 (page 441) is not in fact a proper derivation of E=mc^2 (the real insight, namely the relationship between moving mass and rest mass, is not derived here); we will do a more proper derivation in class.

Spacetime diagrams are covered in Chapter S3; start reading that chapter.

Mass ... causes spacetime to curve, and the curvature of spacetime determines the paths of freely moving objects...

In this lecture, we talked mostly about the latter effect.

We have not yet discussed black holes and gravitational time dilation (page 460) although we'll get there soon. Do read Section S3.4, which discusses the precession of Mercury's orbit, and the bending of light by gravity. Section S3.5 will be covered later.

Finally, read the section starting on page 85 of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe". We'll be reading more of that chapter soon.