PHYSDepot.org | Summer 2026

This is an introductory astronomy reading group hosted for PHYSDepot.org in Summer 2026. For more information on the reading group itself, see the calendar.

The meetings are designed and intended to be roughly 60 minutes in length (including group discussion, problems, etc.). The only lecture-style format is Week 3 on stars, since it is difficult to cram all of stellar astronomy into one week, so there is a lot more information at hand compared to other weeks.

Weekly Breakdown:

The first six weeks are the main curriculum. The remaining are all additional specialized topics.

1. Week 1: Our Cosmic Neighborhood: The Grand Tour
2. Week 2: The Solar System
3. Week 3: Stars: Engines of the Universe
4. Week 4: Galaxies and the Expanding Universe
5. Week 5: The Big Bang & Cosmology
6. Week 6: What the heck is going on?
7. Week 7: Order of Magnitude Estimation: The Power of Ten
8. Week 8: Distant Worlds: Exoplanets & Astrobiology
9. Week 9: Black Holes: The Edge of Reality.
10. Week 10: Astroparticle & Multi-Messenger Astronomy

This repository hosts files related to the reading group. This is mainly the weekly lecture files in HTML and PDF formats. The PDF files are hosted through Github's Large File Storage (LFS), because they are massive in space. As such, we strongly recommend downloading the HTML files, as they are lightweight. They will work in your browser (confirmed for Firefox and Chrome, but should work with others too). Additionally, they do not need any other downloads, as images are linked to Wikimedia Commons directly and the style sheets have been conveniently baked into the HTML files or are hosted on an outside server (like MathJax, for example).

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_{This page was last edited on 07.14.2026.}