Copyright © by the Utah State Office of Education.
Astronomy
The Universe
(Dixie High School)
INTRODUCTION
II. Fusion
1. Energy Sources....a comparison
(mechanics, by-products, resources)
a.
Fossil fuels
b.
Solar
c.
Thermal
d.
Nuclear
i. Fission
ii. Fusion
2. Plasmas
3. Creating conditions for
fusion.
a.
Hot Fusion
i. Tokomaks
ii. Lasers
iii. What's next?
b.
Cold Fusion.......what happened?
c.
Current status on achieving fusion as a viable energy source.
III. Cosmology
1. Preliminaries
a.
Units and "dinner napkin" calculations
2. Dynamics of the Universe
a.
Describing Spacetime
b.
Density Evolution
c.
The Newtonian Perspective
d.
Time Evolution
3. Cosmological Models
a.
Cosmological tests
b.
The age test
c.
The modern picture
i. The Supernova Cosmology Project
4. History of the Universe
a.
Particle Cosmology
b.
Temperature and Density
c.
The "Hawking Story"
d.
The Monopole Problem
e.
Cosmic Puzzles
i. Must we understand initial conditions?
ii. The flatness puzzle
iii. Causality
iiii. The horizon puzzle
iiiii Other puzzles
5. Hubble Expansion
a.
Inflation
i. Potential dominated matter
ii. Inflationary cosmology
iii. The homogeneity puzzle
iiii Inflation, inhomogeneity, and the horizon
6. Nucleosynthesis
a.
Universal equilibrium
i. Thermal conditions
ii. Interactions
7. Cosmic Background Radiation
a.
The observations
b.
What they mean.
8. Cosmic structure formation
a.
The Newtonian perspective
b.
The Robertson Walker version.
c.
Stellar Evolution....the life cycles of stars.
i. Where stars come from.
ii. Childhood, middle and old-age.
iii. What happens to them when they die.