Physics of Solar System Thursday 9:00-10:00, Bragg Friday 9:00-10:00, Bragg Albert Zijlstra (Alan Turing Building, 3.138) Lecture notes, worked examples, Tutorial sheets, example exam papers, and supplementary material are available from this web page. Lecture notes will be added a few days after the lecture. recently added Lecture 22, Tutorial sheet 5 solution notices There will be no lectures for this course during week 12: the last lecture was Friday May 7. Happy revising!

Topics

Lecture 1: Introduction. (See here for high resolution figures of abundances) Lecture 2: Basic facts and observations; History; Tour of the Solar System Lecture 3: Coordinate systems and time keeping Lecture 4: Planetary motions; synodic and siderial periods Supplementary information: Tour of the Solar System : Slide show shown during the lecture Inventory of the Solar System : images and basic information on each planet "The nine planets": an out-of-date name but up-to-date information Views of Distant Earth
2. A matter of gravity Lecture 4: Kepler's laws Lecture 5: Newton's law of gravity Lecture 6: binary motion; Properties of orbits; observational evidence Lecture 7: Gravitational potential; virial theorem Lecture 8:Tidal forces; Lunar and solar tidal force; height of the tides; Resonance Lecture 10: Tidal friction and tidal heating; Evolution of the Moon; Tidal forces in the solar system; Roche limit; The kamikaze comets Lecture 11: Orbits; Reduced mass; Energy and velocities Lecture 12: Hohman transfer orbits; Slingshots; Capture cross sections; Lagrangians points; Lisajous and horsehoe orbits an animation of Our 'second Moon' Cruithne taken from its home page
3. The Sun Lecture 13: Basic data. Freefall time scale; Kelvin Helmholtz time scale. Hydrostatic equilibrium; Nuclear reactions. Lecture 14: Neutrinos; Energy transport; Surface of the Sun; Black body radiation; granulation, sunspots and mass ejections Lecture 15: Sounds of the Sun Sounds of the Sun Solar movies: Solar granulation More detail on granulation. (right: CaII, sensitive to magnetic field) Solar flare Coronal mass ejections Base of a prominence Solar oscillations	Information on the Sun
4. Planetary atmospheres Lecture 15: Atmospheres: introduction. Albedo and optical depth. Lecture 16: Temperatures; greenhouse effect. Scale height of the atmosphere. Lecture 17: Escape: why the Moon has no atmosphere. Composition. Reducing versus oxidizing atmospheres; Lecture 18: Clouds on Earth and elsewhere Movies: 70 days on Jupiter
5. Planetary surfaces Lecture 18: Impact craters Lecture 19: Crater of doom. Regolith. Dating with craters and isotopes More on craters: Craters: Examples of known impact structures Earth impact database A list of confirmed impact structures from around the world Ries Largest impact structure in Europe The Vredefort Dome The largest known crater on Earth Effects Earth Impact Effects Program: calculate the effects of your favourite impact Impact movies: gun shot at soft surface Simulation of an impact of a KT-type object (10km diameter impactor) Simulation of an angled impact
6. Planetary interiors Lecture 20: Evidence for liquid cores; Earthquakes; Core sizes; Heat generation and internal energy budget; radioactivity Lecture 21: Composition of terrestrial planets and gas giants; magnetic fields
7. Origin Lecture 22: The formation of the solar system Animations (shamelessly copied from the web) Spiral structure in the disk, induced by a large new planet Formation of outer planets caused by an inner large planet Migration of Jupiter Growth of terrestrial planets

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Worked examples

Tutorial sheets

Recommended books

• The New Solar System, 4th ed., 1999, Beatty et al.
• The Cambridge Guide to the Solar System, 2003, Lang

• Introductory Astronomy 1999, Holliday (published by Wiley)
  (A book with a bit more physics; some chapters cover some material from this course)

• The new cosmos, 2002, Unsold and Baschek (published by Springer)
  (A book with a lot more physics, giving a general overview of astronoy and going deeper than this course)

Other sites of interest