The following topics are important and are chosen from the Voyages text. This list includes many of the important topics (including all bold-faced terms in the text - these are defined in the glossary), but is not exhaustive.

Chapter 23. Black Holes and Curved Spacetime. General Relativity, equivalence principle, spacetime, light "tries" to travel in straight line (Figure 23.6), advance of Mercury's perihelion (Figure 23.7), deflection of starlight, the stronger the gravity the slower the pace of time, gravitational redshift, escape velocity, black hole, event horizon, Schwarzschild radius, singularity, falling into a black hole, accretion disk, Cygnus X-1.

Chapter 24. The Milky Way Galaxy. Milky Way Galaxy, relation of globular clusters to center of the Galaxy, dimensions and shape of the Galaxy (Figure 24.5), halo, spiral arms, differential galactic rotation, spiral density waves, population I and II stars, dark matter, the Galaxy's corona, nucleus of the Galaxy, formation of the Galaxy (Figure 24.17), protogalactic cloud, satellite galaxies and collisions, light pollution.

Chapter 25. Galaxies. Spiral galaxies, barred spirals, elliptical galaxies, giant ellipticals, dwarf ellipticals, iregular galaxies, line broadening, mass-to-light ratio, use of Type I supernovae to estimate distances, Tully-Fisher technique, other methods for distance estimation (Table 25.2), redshifts, Hubble's law, Hubble constant.

Chapter 26. Quasars and Active Galaxies. Quasars, active galaxies, active galactic nuclei, Seyfert galaxies, radio galaxies, accretion disk around black hole (Figure 26.15), radio jets, gravitational lensing.

Chapter 27. The Organization of the Universe. Isotropic, homogeneous, cosmological principle, Local Group, galaxy clusters, Virgo cluster, superclusters, voids, filaments, star formation in spirals and ellipticals, collisions mergers and star formation, galactic cannibalism, top-down and bottom-up formation of structures, great attractor, MACHOs.

Chapter 28. The Big Bang. Cosmology, cosmological constant, Big Bang, Hubble time, deceleration of Big Bang, closed universe, open universe, curvature of spacetime, average density, critical density, Figure 28.8, oscillating theory, the fate of a closed universe, the fate of an open universe, flat universe, evolution of the early universe (10^-43 sec, 0.01 sec, 3 min), decoupling of matter and radiation, cosmic background radiation (CBR), COBE discovery of CBR temperature variations and implications, the four forces (Table 28.4), grand unified theories, inflationary universe, WIMPS, hot dark matter, cold dark matter.

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