Exploring the Milky Way Course

In this course we travel up to about 500,000 light years and explore our home galaxy in detail.
Version 6. This course is currently being updated to version 6.2.

Title	Description	Run
Click on icon in column Run	The Slide presentation will open in a separate tab
Review previous course	Review of the course Leaving the Solar System.
Sense of Scale & the Milky Way in the Sky	Continuing our scale model up to about 500,000 light years. The basics of the Milky Way galaxy. How do we see it and how does it move in the sky?
Finding Structure	History of how we learned about our galaxy.
Galactic Distance	Cosmic distance ladder continued. Main Sequence Fitting, Luminosity and Distance, Cepheids and RR Lyrae.
Structure of the Milky Way	How we have learned about the galactic structure in detail. Latest results and questions.
Dynamics of the Milky Way & Dark Matter	How do we move in space; density waves in spiral arms; galaxy rotation and mass; rotation curve mystery and Dark Matter.
Dwarfs, Streams and Galactic History	Dwarf galaxies and Streams around the Milky Way and their dynamics. How they reveal the history of our Galaxy.
Towards the Centre	The bulge, long bar and the very dynamic centre of our galaxy. Latest observations.
Special Relativity	Low-level-mathematical but comprehensive introduction to Galilean and Special Relativity.
General Relativity	Low-level-mathematical but comprehensive introduction to General relativity. This is also a preparation for Cosmology in the course Going Deep.
Black Holes	History of our developing knowledge about Black Holes in general, what we know about our own Supermassive Black Hole. We also briefly review the recent imaging of the Supermassive Black Hole in galaxy M87 by the Event Horizon Telescope consortium.
Beyond the Visible	Overview Multi-wavelength astronomy. Radio including VLBI, Infrared, Visible light, Ultraviolet, X-ray and Gamma-ray. History and Detection technology.