Climbing the Distance Ladder to the Big Bang: How Astronomers Survey the Universe – Dragan Huterer (Session 3) (FULL) , Minh Nguyen (Session 1) (FULL)
The furthest objects that astronomers can observe are so distant that their light set out when the Universe was only 800 million years old, and has been traveling to us for about 13 billion years-most of the age of the Universe. Even the Sun’s neighborhood – the local part of our Galaxy, where astronomers have successfully searched for planets around other stars – extends to hundreds of light years. How do we measure the distance to such remote objects? Certainly not in a single step! Astronomers construct the so-called “Distance Ladder,” finding the distance to nearby objects, thus enabling those bodies to be understood and used as probes of yet more distant regions. This class will explore the steps in this ladder, using lectures, discussions, field trips, demonstrations, and computer laboratory exercises. Students will learn basic computer programming for a project to model the effects of gravity, and they will get hands-on experience of using a small radio telescope to map the the rotation speed of the Milky Way and measure the influence of its dark matter. We will cover concepts involving space, time, and matter that go far beyond the distance ladder, and involve some of the most fascinating mysteries in cosmology and astrophysics: What is it like inside a black hole? What is the Dark Matter? What is the Dark Energy that makes the Universe expand faster and faster? Is there other life in the Universe? The class is recommended for students with solid high-school mathematics background, including some exposure to vectors. 

Hunting for the Dark: Black Holes and Dark Matter in the Milky Way – Monica Valluri (Session 2) (FULL)
This course deals with how astronomers determine the properties of two of the most mysterious “dark components” of the universe – dark matter and black holes. While dark matter is only known by its gravitational influence on normal matter, black holes make their presence known by swallowing material from their surroundings. Prior to being swallowed, the in-falling matter forms a glowing hot accretion disk whose spectrum tells us much about the black hole such as its mass and spin. This course will discuss stars, how they evolve and lead to formation of exotic objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. We will then move on to discussing the components and the structure of our own Milky Way Galaxy and other galaxies in the Universe, including dark matter and supermassive black holes. The course will focus on how astronomers gain information about these dark components of the universe using observations over the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays and from the recently discovered gravitational waves. The course will include an introduction to the basic physics and astronomy necessary to understand the advances that astrophysicists have made in our understanding of these strange and fascinating objects. It will include daily lab activities, Python programming and working with astronomical data. The class is recommended for students with a strong high-school mathematics background, including some exposure to geometry, trigonometry, logarithms and vectors.