Claia Bryja’s Web Page

(under construction-- pretty boring and been that way for a very long while, sorry) 

If you’re interested in my ASTR-1 online class, click here.

I also maintain pages for my lecture classes. This semester, I have:

Astronomy 14, Section 2 (“Exploring the Universe,” meeting at 12:00 P.M., M-W-F)

Astronomy 14, Section 3 (“Exploring the Universe,” meeting at 11:00 A.M., T-R)

Astronomy 17 (“Solar System”)

Astronomy 18 (“Stars”)

A few biographical facts about me:

I’m originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, but I came to the U.S. as a college student. I double majored in physics and theatre at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and then went on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Since then, I’ve lived and worked in Mankato Minnesota and Springfield Missouri before arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001.

I live in a cohousing community in Pleasant Hill, in central Contra Costa County, with my husband Rich, my nine-year-old daughter Melissa, and 31 other households that hold 46 other grown-ups with 27 kids between them. All of these people are our “village” neighbors. For more about this cohousing thing, including photos, etc., go to http://www.phch.org.

Here’s an astronomy adventure I had a few years ago that I still need to finish writing about (but at least it’s readable; I’ll try to update this sometime or other, since I do have some meaningful results to add in conclusion): The Story of How I Went to Egypt to Observe the Transit of Venus on June 8^th, 2004

My original passion in astronomy was for the stars: especially the smallest, meekest, and the dimmest stars that can be found. (Just ask me about red dwarfs, white dwarfs, and brown dwarfs sometime.) Of late, however, my main focus has been some theoretical work on the problem of what the mysterious “dark energy” is that presently appears to dominate our universe and is blamed for causing the expansion of space in the universe to speed up.