Syllabus
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Disability Resources
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Videos on reserve
Research Groups
Near-Earth orbits
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The Universe began in the gigantic explosion of the Big Bang,
but will it end in the Big Crunch, as everything comes crashing back
together? Or in the Big Rip, when Dark Energy tears everything apart
atom by atom? The story of how the Universe came to be the way it is, and
how it might end, is a dramatic one, with many twists and turns, especially
in the development of human understanding. All along the way many disasters
await the unwary, including supernova explosions, wandering black holes
spaghettifying everything in their path, and asteroids and comets intersecting
Earth's orbit, not to mention the giant Andromeda galaxy barreling straight at us.
Join us as we explore the structure and evolution of our Universe and how
string theory, extra dimensions, and the Higgs particle may play roles in understanding it.
We will consider structure on many scales, from subnuclear to planetary, stellar,
galactic, and beyond, including the latest data on gravitational waves from
merging black holes and on the Higgs from the
Large Hadron Collider, and give special emphasis to "Ellies", extinction-level
events, the ultimate one being, of course, the end of the Universe itself.
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