Archive for the ‘Astrophysics’ Category
Thursday, March 14th, 2019
A while ago, I got a great question from one of my students in the Emory class - what does a star's size got to do with its magnitude? And as she later explained, the words "size" and "magnitude" mean almost the same thing. They are similar, in our common ...
Posted in Astrophysics | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 10th, 2014
What do you get when you put a bunch of bright young stars together in a prominent place? No, it's not a Hollywood casting party, it's an open cluster! In fact, you could end up with as many as a thousand stars in one bunch. It's "Bigger than the Oscars"!!! ...
Posted in Astrophysics | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014
There is a lot of excitement surrounding the supernova event in M82. It was discovered on January 21st by the University College of London during a training session with graduate students. The actual event probably occurred around the 15th of January. Known as Supernova SN2014J, the exploding star is "only" ...
Posted in Astrophysics | No Comments »
Sunday, March 10th, 2013
One of my previous posts considered the use of the terms magnitude and size when talking about a star. Well, as I pointed out, when we are talking about stars, one has to start with the term "mass". Everything depends on the stellar mass. That is the starting point when ...
Posted in Astrophysics | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
A common question comes up now and then about the period of the moon's orbits. I've been sort of giving round numbers until recently but I thought I'd better look up the periods to get an exact number. So, off to Wikipedia for this page on Jupiter's Moons and a ...
Posted in Astrophysics | No Comments »