The Life and Death of Stars and Their Planets

From old, humanity has wondered about the stars and what is out there in space. In the beginning, humans focused on visual ways to find and convey those answers, but in roughly the last century, astronomers have developed various techniques to explore, discover, and convey in-depth information about the mysteries of the universe. In this course students learn about the life and death of stars while focusing on how the death of a star is involved in the generation of more stellar wonders and even life in the universe. We use telescopes to obtain our own data and apply state-of-the-art computer code to model and characterize real stars and their planets. This is an interactive, in-depth astronomy course covering introductory themes.