Syllabus

General information

LEFT: The red trajectory shows the 1st known visitor from interstellar space (hence 1I in the name) called 1I/2017 U1 (Oumuamua). Discovered in 2017 by a military Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii at a distance of 0.22 AU from Earth, the small object came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, cruising through interstellar space at 26.33 km/s. Its classification as a small comet vs. asteroid ejected from another planetary system has changed over time: c,a,c,neither. The second, much larger interstellar object shown by yellow line, is the 2I/Borisov comet. It's speed in space (32.2 km/s) and the perihelion distance (2AU) are larger, therefore the deflection angle after flyby is much smaller than 1I's. As luck would have it, Borisov's comet came shortly after Oumuamua in 2019.
CENTER LEFT: A visitor from Oort Cloud was spotted in March 2022 by Californian astronomers. The Green Comet or C/2022 E3 (ZTF) flew closest to us on 1 Feb 2023, at a safe distance of 0.28 AU. Green light was due to a complex interaction of UV sunlight with C₂ molecules it ejected (among others). This comet was initially classified as an asteroid, and may or may not become interstellar after this passage through the inner Solar System.
CENTER RIGHT: A large (up to 9 km radius) Oort cloud comet C/2017 K2 PanSTARRS, passing by stellar cluster M10 in 2022 near its 1.797 AU perihelion. On nearly-parabolic inbound orbit (aphelion ~50000 AU), it started outgassing & creating coma early on (beyond the distance of Saturn), probably due to the CO ice sublimation.
RIGHT: The 3rd interstellar visitor seen so far, comet I3/ATLAS, was discovered 1 July 2025 by the global, robotic Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). See this image by Gemini South telescope in Chile). Despite the perihelium at 1.35 AU its trajectory was only very weakly bent (high e=6.13941) on account of large interstellar speed of 58 km/s. Both the 1st and the 3rd interstellar visitors elicited numerous baseless explanations as alien spaceships, even by a professional astronomer (Avi Loeb) and a physicist/writer (Michio Kaku).

At the end, the course introduces you to basic astrobiology concepts.

Course and textbook

"Fundamental Planetary Science: Physics, Chemistry and Habitability" by Jack J. Lissauer and Imke de Pater (2013, 2019). I will mention where to find the book in the tutorial. You don't have to read the whole textbook. Several chapters might give you another angle on or another wording of issues than Lectures, but they are not a required reading. Only Chapter 15 is obligatory, please study it.

Be careful not to confuse it with "Planetary Sciences" (by the same authors), which is a different, graduate-level, version book I mention in the section on other books, below.

Other books

Marking Scheme:

Grading is standard: minimum percentage marks for letter grades (for orientation only, since grades are reported as percentages)
A+ 90%, A 85%, A- 80%, B+ 77%, B 73%, B- 70%, C+ 67%, C 63%, C- 60%, D+ 57%, D 53%, D- 50%, F 49% or less.

*) Up to 3 activity points will be awarded for activity during lectures and tutorials (asking questions). Full 4 points will only be awarded for coming to an office hour and successfully sharing your knowledge gained from an optional book. The level of the book must be appropriate, subject should concern planetary systems. Examples of appropriate books are linked in the Other Books section above. For pre-approval, email me the author and title of a book that is not on the list of recommended books, or show me during a break.

Contact information including emergencies & office hours

Preferably use mail.utoronto.ca service, avoid sending mail from gmail. UTSC mailer has problems with responding to gmail. Please mention your student number when discussing your personal questions or marks (the temporary results file only lists the last digits of your student number, not your name.) Do not send email or comments to me via Quercus (I rarely check things there, and it's impossible for me to reply.)

Office hours: between lecture and tutorial & immediately after tutorial.

Homework problems

General info

Please remember to number the pages and sign all of them with your name and last 3 digits of student number, say, "...123". Write legibly; very messy homeworks cannot be graded. Please give enough details IN WORDS of the solution procedure. It's as important as the correct final answer. And don't forget to follow the guidelines on what a decent solution must contain (below) such as checking physical units.

Everything you submit and the comments by the marking TA will be visible on Quercus. It will allow multiple submission of the files before deadline, so if you have corrections to your solution please post an updated file before the deadline (so it's not marked as late). You will be able to see and check a computational/calculational solution against a published one. This will make long explanations by the marker (TA) unnecessary, so don't expect very detailed comments on Quercus. Individual problems will have a nominal point value displayed, and the TA will report your marks relative to these max scores. But the eventual "out of" or maximum score for a given task will be decided by the lecturer, and sometimes slightly re-adjusted toward the end of the course in your favor. Check the preliminary results file further down on this web page. The "out of" line gives the number of points yielding 100% mark for a given task.

What steps are required for full solution?

1. A sketch of the situation
2. Analytical part - manipulation of symbols to find the required relationships between quantities
3. Units checks
4. If units are ok (then & only then) substitute the constants and values, calculate the results
5. Decide whether results make sense (e.g., is the order of magnitude ok?)
6. Write up final version legibly and clearly, put student # on the 1st page. Explain in words what you're doing, don't just write equations.

Deadlines. Time: the beginning of first lecture (13:00).

There are no extensions for assignments. It is both because of the fairness to all those who respect deadlines, and the pedagogic needs (right after the deadline we post and/or discuss solutions in the tutorial.) AccessAbility students will receive an accommodation consisting of 12-13 days to solve assignment.
Either late submission or point transfer will be done at the discretion of the professor only in proven medical or personal or family emergency/bereavement, which you will need to prove in the University-prescribed way [either Absence (Self-)Declaration via ACORN, only 1 week allowed per term, or University Verification of Student Illness/Injury (VOI), which is a doctor's note. Send me the document.]

Likewise, a special treatment will be extended to justified & documented absence at midterm. There are no deferred midterms in ASTC25. Points will be transferred to final exam; you must submit a self-declaration on Acorn and send me a copy, see this page).

Please do not ask for individual extensions because of assignments/exams in other courses - such circumstances are not emergencies, not a sufficient ground for exceptions, and granting them would be unfair to others. Work in other courses should be known and taken by you into account ahead of time. Use the extra 2 days you have to solve any scheduling problems.

🤔   Four problem sets

If there are misprints or anything else unclear about the problem set and/or access to it, please ask immediately and allow up to a day for an answer. It is too late to ask one day before the due date.
Set A1. Due Thu 28 Jan. Formulation Prob. set 1, PDF . Solutions : cf. this PDF .
Set A2. Due Thu 11 Feb. Formulation: In this PDF . Use summary of facts on orbital motion from A1. Solutions: cf. this PDF.
Set A3. Due Thu 11 Mar. Problem formulation: In this PDF. Solutions of A3: this PDF
Set A4. Due Thu 25 Mar. Last set: this PDF. Solutions: this PDF

😞   Note on plagiarism, including the use of "AI"

Lectures (pdf + animations)

Tutorials

Brief FAQ

Q: What is the format of the final exam?
A: Exactly the same as midterm, just longer. The level of difficulty is also the same. 2/3 of final are from the post-midterm material, 1/3 from the pre-midterm material.

Q: Are exams open-book?
A: No they are not. Electronic devices except calculator are also prohibited.

Q: Are own notes allowed at exams?
A: YES, own handwritten (not photocopied) notes are allowed: 4 pages at midterm, 8 pages at the final. That's pages, not sheets. You decide if the notes are single-sided or double-sided, and what to write in them. (There is no need to copy tables of planetary data, since all the constants needed for the solution will be provided in the exam.) You retain the midterm notes, you can re-use them during the final.

Q: Until when can I drop the course without academic penalty?
A: Until about 25 March or so, google the UTSC sessional dates listing.

Q: Is my presence at *all* lectures and tutorials required?
A: It isn't enforced or mandatory, but it expected & VERY helpful for you to attend both the lectures and the tutorials. The lectures DO NOT follow literally a single book or 2 books, except for sometimes quoting the assorted fragments of our textbook 1 (book no.1 above). Advantages of participating in meetings are many: (i) the points for participation (see Marking section), (ii) you get information beyond what's in the textbook and posted materials, some of which may be *very* valuable at test/exam. I strongly encourage and expect you to engage and take own notes (I do write some things on the blackboard or whiteboard). Not everything will be recorded. Most of the (exo)planetary system theory is not yet found in any undergraduate textbooks, so hearing it presented in our meetings will be helpful. We will be discussing solutions to home assignments and solving new problems during the tutorials. Tutorials are your ability to use the theory, in the written part of exams, and beyond.

Q: Will there be recordings of lectures made available and can't I just use them instead of coming to in-person meetings?
A: We provide lots of material online but it does not replaced lectures or tutorials. Recordings from earlier years or from AURA (semi-automatic system) will be posted in Media Gallery on Quercus. There are occasional glitches in both, including downtime of microphone because batteries fail, bad visibility of blackboard, and so on. The course is in-person, so you should not primarily rely on recordings but attend all the lectures & ask any questions you have in class or during the break. You will also have the current PDF lecture notes and some tutorials writeups, below. Re-download them every week, since a small part of each file is normally updated or expanded shortly before and sometimes after the lecture.

Q: I have a schedule conflict with another course. Can I skip all the lectures (or all tutorials)?
A: If you have a scheduling conflict, a fair advice would be: preferably drop the other course or, if need be, this course. If you cannot follow this advice, you'll have to rely on recordings, which are not guaranteed to be full and of high quality, especially of the tutorials, which are impossible to record well.

Q: Is this page going to be always visible or should I download things I need from it to my computer?
A: It did happen once that the 'planets' server became unreachable 2 days before the exam. The networking problem was solved in the last minute, putting a lot of stress on those who did not download the preperatory material ahead of time. Set up a directory on your computer and download or refresh lecture notes and other files you may need (syllabus etc.) need every week, e.g. during the lecture.

Midterm exam - general info & preparation

You do the Quiz on the supplied exam sheet (please do not list quiz answers in the exam booklet!)
Mark the correctness of the sentence (Y/N) in front of the sentence. If you answer N, please also circle 1 to 4 words or numbers which are incorrect, otherwise your answer will be treated as a pure guess (no penalty but no credit, either).
Written part requires calculations. If you need scratch paper for that, use the blank pages of the exam booklet. We won't mark those. Your final solution must be found legibly written on lined pages.

Everything that was in the lectures and tutorials (and assignments) up to the reading week can be the subject of midterm exam, so study the notes up to and including L10 (up to SPH simulation of star cluster formation), all posted recordings, and the tutorial notes.

Midterm Quiz will be testing notions and facts discussed in Lectures. The texbook may provide additional clarifications but is not required for the midterm. (This may not be the case in the final exam, chapt. 15 of Lissauer/de Pater book will need to be read.)

Own handwritten notes and calculators will be allowed at midterm (see FAQs above). Nothing else is allowed, no electronic devices during the exam. Quiz usually takes about 20 min. You decide what to do first, quiz or written part. But remember that they carry approximately the same weight, so probably doing Quiz first makes more sense.

A training set of quiz questions is provided below. This version has about 50% of answers provided. Not sure if the scope exatly covers all lectures up to the SPH simulation of star cluster formation in L10 (the required material are all lectures up to this point). PDF.
Next I provide a set of sample written problems . Just like the Quiz, to prepare well for the exam, please solve the unsolved items with or without the lecture notes and texbook in hand. Problems without solutions . And here is the set of the problems with most answers or hints provided, but you should use it after you find your own solutions: problems-with-solutions .

Remember that a fully solved problem (in exam or assignment) may require all 6 points listed earlier in the section on homeworks.

Study the format of midterm in this actual 2024 midterm file. midterm 2024 w/solutions. There may be some overlap with the preparation files above.
In 2024, the midterm problem was about:

Instructions and preparation for the final exam on ?? April (rm ??, time ??)