荣誉天文学科学学士学位-密西沙加

天文学
Astronomy, of all the sciences, is perhaps the most wide-ranging in its content and in its implications. The study of astronomy covers vastly different orders of magnitude in scale - from physics at the scale of a single atom all the way to physics on the scale of the size of the universe itself. It embraces such fundamental topics as the origin of the planets and moons of the solar system, the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies, the earliest moments of the universe's history, the behaviour of matter in environments never experienced on earth, the conditions for life on earth and elsewhere, and in general, the influence of the universe on humankind's thinking throughout the ages. Astronomy is also one of the oldest and most universal scientific disciplines. Cultures around the world and throughout human history have constructed knowledge about the universe via observations of the night sky.<br> Modern astronomy research is conducted through observations with large telescopes on high mountaintops or even in space. These observatories give us access to photons emitted by objects both in our local galactic neighborhood and in extremely distant galaxies, which we try to understand in conjunction with theoretical physical models and large scale computer simulations. As such, astronomy is a highly interdisciplinary field, drawing in knowledge and techniques from physics, optics, mathematics, computer science, earth and atmospheric science, and statistics. Because of its breadth, it has always formed a valuable part of a general education. Students who focus on astronomy as a major or specialist will emerge from their studies with valuable and widely applicable skills in all of these subject areas.