Stars are usually described as being somewhat alive: they are born from a cloud of gas, maintain a life-like metabolism for a long time, and die after their cores run out of material for nuclear fusion. While all stars begin their lives in a similar way, stars have quite an incredible variation of how they die. Many go through a violent, titanic explosion and end up being a “dead star”: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. These dead stars are extremely difficult to spot in the night sky. In this class, we will see how we come to know about these dead stars, and how these stars have been useful in helping us understand the universe and our place in the cosmos.

Many of us take our everyday modern knowledge for granted. We make claims about the world: that the Earth is a sphere of a certain mass, that a star is so-and-so distance from us, and that the Universe did not exist eternally before us, but how do we exactly know these facts? This elective aims to show the beauty in the reconstruction of human knowledge of the physical world. The course explores two distinct worlds: first, our home, the Earth; and second, outer space, the Heavens. We begin first by looking microscopically at the secrets that we can find of the Earth, before peering out to the sky to look for the secrets of the Heavens.