This is an introductory course on galaxies and cosmology. The essential facts are below; more details are available from the syllabus:

• Prerequisites: AST221
• Exclusions: AST201
• When/Where: AB107, 12-1pm, Mon, Wed, Fri
• The texts we'll use (required) are: Carroll & Ostlie, Modern Astrophysics, which you should already have, and Jones & Lambourne, Galaxies and Cosmology.
• Office Hours: Instructor - TBA; TA - TBA
• Assignments: There will be five assignments handed out, about every other Friday, due in one week at the start of class.
• Midterm Test: Will be held on Fri, 12 Feb, in class, just before reading week.
• Final Exam: TBA; the university exam schedule comes out the day of the midterm.
• Marking: Final marks will be 50% Assignments, 20% Midterm, 30% Final; for assignment mark we will drop the lowest score.

In this course, we will learn how astronomers have deduced over the past century that we live in a universe filled with galaxies that is about 14 billion years old, probably infinite in extent and expanding uniformly in all directions. We will study the large population of galaxies in the universe starting with the Milky Way, learning about their composition, stellar populations, dimensions, general structure and gravitational dynamics. The galaxies are evolving objects exhibiting complex dynamical behaviour spurred on by the interplay of gravity, gas dynamics, radiation and the transformation of gas into stars. Galaxies are also tracers of a complex large-scale structure that is telling us something about the origins of the universe. We will study the current theory of the Hot Big Bang and learn about modern cosmological ideas on the origin of the galaxies and the large-scale structure and their connection to the cosmic microwave background radiation.