This course wiki is designed to be a main reference in the Coursera course “Analyzing the Universe”, in conjunction with Dr. Matilsky’s video lectures. Each week’s quiz will be designed to test understanding of the concepts presented in both the lecture, and the wiki itself.
The main material will be under each week’s tab. We have included links to external sites that will aid in the understanding of the various nomenclature and concepts presented in the course. For the most part these links are supplementary to the wiki, but in other pages the bulk of the actual information you should be reading is in one of these external links and we will attempt to be explicitly clear when this is the case.
We color-coded the links blue if they are to external content other that from Wikipedia, red if they are directing you to a Wikipedia article, and purple if it is a link to another page within this course’s wiki. I have tried to link you to over-arching Wikipedia articles for the various subsections in each wiki article for your convenience.
Week 1: Lenses/Optics, Scientific Notation/Dimensional Analysis, and the Nature of Light
Week 2: Astronomical Triangle, Atomic Spectra, and The Cosmic Distance Scale
Week 3: Hertzsprung-Russell Diagrams, Stellar Evolution, and Type Ia Supernovae
Week 4: Neutron Stars and The Doppler Effect
Week 5: Core -Collapse Supernovae and Supernova Remnants
Week 6: Galaxy Clusters/Dark Matter, Black Holes, and Hubble's Law/Constant
