Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics
Charles Bailyn's Yale course on the three areas of astronomy he considers to be moving fastest: extrasolar planets, black holes, and dark energy. Recorded in Spring 2007, the 26 sessions run from planetary orbits and the Kepler mission through stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, tests of relativity, Hubble's Law, and updates added later on the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO. Weekly problem sets combine quantitative work with essay questions, and there are two open-book midterms plus a final, all posted alongside the video lectures. Bailyn, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale, focuses as much on what remains unknown as on settled results. His research on binary black hole systems appeared in the PBS series Mysteries of Deep Space.