The grand goal of astrophysics is to understand everything beyond Earth's outer atmosphere. In this course, our focus will be a deep understanding of first stars and then galaxies (how do they form, evolve, end?). Towards the end of the semester, we will consider the Universe as a whole, introducing the fascinating physics of cosmology.
What is temperature? How does a gas actually provide pressure? Why does the entropy of an isolated system increase and not decrease? To answer these and many other questions, we need to turn to the statistical mechanics and thermal physics covered in this course.