A new Planetary Sciences Specialist Program (PLN) together with Chemistry, Geology, and Physics begins in 1999/2000. Our new Origins faculty in Star Formation, Extrasolar Planetary Systems, and Astrophysics of the Interstellar Medium (§ 2.5.1) will be the natural instructors to participate most actively in this program and to introduce some new courses described below. Furthermore, we will participate in the new Planetary Science seminar and research-project courses.
Extrasolar Planetary Systems: upper-year course for students in the specialist programs Astronomy & Physics or Planetary Science (25 FCE). Among the most startling recent astronomical discoveries are detections of planets around other stars. This course discusses current and future techniques for finding such planets, the surprising properties of the systems that have been detected, and general theories for the origin of planetary systems. It will also introduce students to many topics in optics, radiation theory, classical dynamics and instrumentation. At the third year level, this course will require a background in second year astronomy and appropriate math and physics.
Life in the Universe: for mathematical and/or physical science students who are not specialists in Astronomy (100 FCE). We currently offer an exceptionally popular term course ``Life on Other Worlds'' (enrollment room-limited at 196) aimed at life science students. We will introduce this complementary course for mathematical and physical science students. The current course began as an interdisciplinary course with Botany and this approach could be revived with any life science department interested in either of these courses.
Our new faculty member in Computational Astrophysics (§ 2.5.3) will provide a new undergraduate course driven by the needs of computer science, physics, and astronomy students. Dyer, whose undergraduate responsibilities have been in computer science and numerical analysis at the Scarborough campus (UTAS), provides a successful model for such an approach.
Computational Astrophysics: upper-year course aimed at a broad mix of Astronomy, Physics, and Computer Science students and ``the new MPC'' (see § 3; 25 FCE). Including several elements - algorithms (such as the tree-code), searching and data base techniques, numerical methods, and image analysis - our course will be organized around ``case studies'' which will draw together A&A problems and related ``real world'' problems that can be solved with similar techniques.