Teaching · Courses

Courses

The astronomy courses CASSA teaches at Independent University, Bangladesh — from a gateway open to every student to an upper-level astrophysics catalogue.

The catalogue

Nine ways into the universe

  1. 01 AST 100

    Our Cosmic History

    Fourteen billion years, told as a single story. From the first second after the Big Bang to the rise of life and mind, the universe unfolds across seven ages — no equations, no jargon, just the grand arc of cosmic change and where humanity sits within it. The one course anyone can take.

    Explore the AST 100 site
  2. 02 AST 200

    History of Astronomy

    Three thousand years of looking up. Stone circles and Babylonian tablets, the geometry of the Greeks, the great observatories of the Islamic world, and the revolution that moved the Sun to the centre — the long human effort to read the sky and, again and again, remake our place in it.

  3. 03 AST 201

    Introduction to Astronomy

    How astronomy is actually done. Light and the messengers it carries, the coordinate grids that pin down the sky, the optics of telescopes and the silicon of detectors — then the hands-on craft of turning raw photons into a calibrated, science-ready image.

  4. 04 AST 301

    Introduction to Astrophysics

    Where the equations begin. The Friedmann model of an expanding cosmos and its thermal history from a hot, dense start; how matter clumped into the structure we see; and the 21-cm hydrogen line that radio astronomers chase all the way back to the cosmic dawn.

  5. 05 AST 401

    Planets and Planetary Systems

    Worlds, near and far. How planets condense out of disks of gas and dust, the architecture of our own solar system, the five ways we hunt planets around other stars — and the question underneath it all: where else could life take hold?

  6. 06 AST 402

    Stars and Interstellar Medium

    The life and death of stars. Binary dynamics and the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, the nuclear furnaces burning in stellar cores, a close look at our own Sun, and the clouds of gas and dust between the stars where the next generation is forged.

  7. 07 AST 403

    Galaxies and Intergalactic Medium

    Islands of stars and the web that strings them together. The Milky Way and its kin, the scaling laws that govern galaxies, the violent engines of active nuclei and quasars, and how it all assembled from the first light after cosmic dawn.

  8. 08 AST 410

    Radio Astronomy

    Tuning in to the invisible universe. The physics of radio emission, the engineering of dishes and receivers, the art of interferometry that links antennas across continents (ALMA, SKA), and the 21-cm song of neutral hydrogen ringing across the sky.

  9. 09 PHY 424

    Atmospheric and Space Physics

    Earth as a planet in space. The structure of the atmosphere and the weather it drives, the motion of charged particles through magnetic fields, the magnetosphere and ionosphere that shield us — and the electrodynamics that paints the aurora.