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Modern astronomy is unwrapping the cosmos at light speed. Here are a few headlines from the last five years:

• Mars was drenched in water
• Particles traveling faster than light have been found leaving "sonic boom" signatures
• Black holes not only exist; they are abundant
• Our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy and together they will absorb most local galaxies
• The cosmos is expanding at an accelerating rate
• We haven't found 90% of the energy in the cosmos (five years ago, we knew that 90% of the matter was missing).

While our customers have been absorbing the astronomical secrets unveiled by Alex Filippenko's original 1998 course, Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, astronomers, physicists, and cosomologists have continued to race ahead, making dazzling new discoveries and creating still more questions at an astounding rate.

That's why Professor Filippenko—who has himself played a major role in several of those discoveries—is back to teach this new course, Understanding the Universe: What's New in Astronomy, 2003.

In this course, he builds on the remarkable discoveries astronomers and physicists have made during the past five years. This course devotes much more of its content to the implications of recent discoveries for our fundamental understandings of physics and the cosmos. Half of the lectures discuss our recently shaken understandings of the origin and fate of the universe.

Tracking the plan of the first course, Professor Filippenko begins with the nearby and accessible—the night sky seen with the naked eye—and moves to the planets, the stars, the galaxies, and then to the unimaginably vast forces that unite them all.

By building on the foundation laid by his first course, Professor Filippenko enables you to follow at a very sophisticated level the continuing revelations of the universe's secrets in newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet.

You'll instantly understand the implications when you hear of new planets being discovered or old ones possibly being relegated to less-than-planetary status; or of the discovery of black holes in the process of merging and releasing gravity waves; or about the ongoing exploration of exactly why the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating and what the nature of the "dark energy" that appears to be causing this expansion may be.

As a key member of the team of astronomers that made this stunning last discovery, Professor Filippenko is the ideal guide on this fresh voyage through the cosmos. (Science magazine described the finding as perhaps the most important astronomical discovery of the century.)

Cited in nearly 500 papers and abstracts, his research is at the leading edge of astronomical investigation.

And Professor Filippenko can teach: he was voted by students "Best Professor" at the University of California at Berkeley in 1995, 2001, 2003, and 2004.

The first course, Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy , is certainly not a prerequisite for understanding the concepts in this one. However the 30 hours of richly detailed background material in the first course make it an ideal companion to the 12 hours of material in this new update.

Understanding the Universe: What's New in Astronomy, 2003 is very visual, filled with images, video clips, and photos. You don't simply hear about supernovae, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, or the stunning deep field photographs transmitted to us by the Hubble Space Telescope, you actually see them, as Professor Filippenko uses more than 700 images, including pictures, diagrams, graphs, and animations.

Have you ever wondered whether there are exceptions to the "rule" that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? Indeed, there are, and Professor Filippenko, in a discussion of the formation and evolution of stars, uses both photographs and diagrams to explain how the speed of light is depressed by a third in water, and how charged particles can exceed that depressed speed, betraying their presence by emitting the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom, a detectable discharge known as Cherenkov light.

You'll also hear the story of how astronomers were at first kept in the dark in the late 1960s when military satellites meant to identify violations of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty began to detect frequent bursts of gamma rays—a high-energy form of electromagnetic radiation—that the military feared might be coming from nuclear weapons testing.

When it was determined that the bursts were actually coming from the sky, and astronomers were finally notified, a chain of discoveries revealed that the radiation was not only coming from the sky but from distant galaxies.

Through images and animations—including a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telegraph of an explosive gamma ray burst from nine and a half billion years ago, equivalent to a million million suns exploding simultaneously—you'll learn the latest theories about how these rays were born amidst the explosive chaos of stars forming and collapsing to black holes as the universe was taking shape.

Astronomers are as interested in the future as in the past, and you'll be surprised at what eventually awaits our own galaxy as Professor Filippenko uses both space photography and animations to show the process of galaxies merging—including our own Milky Way with the Andromeda Galaxy in six to seven billion years, followed by this new "super galaxy's" absorption of other local galaxies—a process that also includes the merger of all of the black holes within those galaxies into a single, massive black hole in that final "super galaxy."

Dr. Filippenko devotes his final lectures to a fascinating exploration of some of the most speculative of the theories astronomers and physicists have posed to answer those questions about the universe that still linger. These include inflation theory, the possibility of light traveling faster in the past (a hypothesis that does away with the Big Bang entirely), Modified Newtonian Dynamics, and the theoretical possibility that there is more than one universe and more than four dimensions.

Though this course often covers complex ground, with forays into Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics, Professor Filippenko is always mindful of the need for making his material as clear as possible to those without a background in the subject.

Whether using graphics, demonstrations, or physical props—including simple balls and heating packs sold in camping supply stores—Professor Filippenko is eager to share with his audience his wonder at a universe that is no less wondrous to him for his knowledge of it.

Indeed, the wonder is growing greater. As he notes at the end of the course, "the fact that we have curiosity and can comprehend the universe behooves us to not squander these abilities, and to use them—to use this gift to our full potential."

This course includes more than 700 images, including pictures, diagrams, graphs, and animations.