Galaxies and Cosmology with S. George Djorgovski

hello my name is george dragowski and i'm a professor of astronomy at caltech cosmology is the part of astronomy or physics that deals with universes as a whole its global properties evolution and its major constituents such as galaxies cosmology addresses the perennial fundamental questions of origins in the world and the fascination with the night sky what is out there and how did it get to be that way today we have scientific testable knowledge that answers such questions and poses some new ones we will cover subjects such as cosmological models or what is the global geometry and dynamics of the universe from the big bang to the present day how do we test such models and measure the size and the age of the universe what does the universe contain including dark matter and dark energy and how do we know that they exist what happened in the early universe from the inflation to cosmic nuclear synthesis to recombination and the cosmic microwave background how did the structure in the universe form and evolve from the first stars and galaxies to the large scale structure what are the physical properties of galaxies and how do they get to be that way quasars and other active galactic nuclei that are powered by supermassive black holes and how they evolve and interact with their host galaxies this class requires a good background knowledge of physics from mechanics to the quantum physics and the math to match it also requires some astronomical background for example you will need to know how stars work and evolve considerably more than typical introductory astronomy class we will have a variety of tests homeworks a midterm and final exam the exact details of these have still been worked out there will be also an online component of the class for discussions questions clarifications and that will be a very important part of the class so if you have the right preparation and you'd like to learn about physical universe you will probably enjoy this class