AST 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, Pearson Education

• School: Syracuse University
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: AST 101
• Professor: Walter Freeman

Document Summary

Grades will be posted when they"re done grading. He"s catching up on email tomorrow morning: prof. freeman is free to talk about anything at any time, we are all welcome in his classroom and office. How the sun and the solar system formed. How the planets formed, the history of earth, and how we know it. The special role of atmospheres - the greenhouse effect and climate change. The rest of the solar system: what else is out there, and what might live there. Travel to the moon; the current state of spaceflight. And what we might find living there once we do. An enormous hydrogen/helium star, with trace elements, at the middle. Four small, rocky planets around it, including our own. Lots of small icy bodies (pluto and eris among them) Orbit roughly along the plane of the solar system. The solar system formed out of a cloud of gas that collapsed under its own gravity.