Modern astronomy is unwrapping the cosmos at light speed. Here are a few headlines from the last five years:

• Mars was drenched in water
  
• Particles traveling faster than light have been found leaving "sonic boom" signatures
  
• Black holes not only exist; they are abundant
  
• Our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy and together they will absorb most local galaxies
  
• The cosmos is expanding at an accelerating rate
  
• We haven't found 90% of the energy in the cosmos (five years ago, we knew that 90% of the matter was missing).
  

While our customers have been absorbing the astronomical secrets unveiled by Alex Filippenko's original 1998 course, Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, astronomers, physicists, and cosomologists have continued to race ahead, making dazzling new discoveries and creating still more questions at an astounding rate.

That's why Professor Filippenko—who has himself played a major role in several of those discoveries—is back to teach this new course, Understanding the Universe: What's New in Astronomy, 2003.

In this course, he builds on the remarkable discoveries astronomers and physicists have made during the past five years. This course devotes much more of its content to the implications of recent discoveries for our fundamental understandings of physics and the cosmos. Half of the lectures discuss our recently shaken understandings of the origin and fate of the universe.

Tracking the plan of the first course, Professor Filippenko begins with the nearby and accessible—the night sky seen with the naked eye—and moves to the planets, the stars, the galaxies, and then to the unimaginably vast forces that unite them all.