Astrophysical Spectroscopy Lab Report

Harvard was a man’s place in 1901 with women seen as a lesser comparison to men. At the time these women astronomers were trying to map and classify the types of stars. Annie was important to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, because she was the key to understanding the substance of the stars. She led of a group of women, which catalogued a quarter of a million stars. The true distinction among stars was discovered by Annie and her team with the use of prisms. Annie and her team would allow light from a star to fall through a prism placed in a telescope. This prism would then split the light into a band showing its component colors. These component colors are red rays on one end, and violet rays on the other end. Using this spectrum of a star, Annie began to classify stars using their different spectral lines. This took Annie decades to classify the spectral characteristics of 100,000 different stars according to the scheme she came up with.

It is easy to flip to the index of an astronomy textbook to discover that, say, the Sun lies 150 million kilometers away from Earth. It is far more difficult (if not impossible), however, to picture this distance in our mind. In this exercise, we will learn to access the often unpalatable distances encountered in astronomy by simply scaling the huge distances to more recognizable, familiar numbers. So long as every distance within the system of interest is scaled by the same

[27] Scientists can determine what a distant star is made of by looking at ____.

This experiment was design to find the amount of copper in a penny using a visible spectroscopy. We achieved this by combining .89 to .93 of Cu(NO3)2*2.5H2O to a 25mL volumetric flask and filling the flask to about half full with deionized water, swirl, then fill to the line with more deionized water. After, fill a 25mL burret with Cu2+ stock, with this add .5, 1, 1.5, and 2 mL of the stock to four different volumetric flask, add 2mL of 15 M NH3 from the burret to each flask and swirl, then fill to the line with deionized water. First, calibrate the spectrophotometer then; enter samples of each of the four samples in the spectrophotometer to test the absorbency. For the penny stock solution, use a 500 mL filter flask with about 250 mL of 1 M NaOH, place a rubber stopper to the top and connect a inverted long stem funnel to it using tygon tubing, and place a 125 mL flask below it. Turn on the water aspirator, place the penny in the 125 mL flask, measure out 20-25 mL of 8 M nitric acid in a 50 mL graduated cylinder, and then slowly add it. It should take about 5-10 minutes for the penny to dissolve.

It also has the ability to collect sufficient light from the dim and distant stars. After information was captured, it was then reviewed on a computer. The focus was placed on the black vertical lines known as absorption lines which corresponded with different chemical elements in the outer shell of the star. The information that has been collected and analyzed over the past years shows both halo stars and dim dwarf galaxy stars have weak absorption lines. When the photon energy is close to the energy difference between the lower and higher states, the process is called resonance, this produces high absorption. When the opposite is true, the absorption is small (Frebel,

I am contacting you on behalf of the Astronomy Club. As you may or may not have heard, the Associated Students of the University of Arizona released a statement to all of the clubs on campus saying that the Appropriations Board had a meeting on March 6th and concluded that it no longer had any more funds to support any of the clubs until further notice. We received this approximately 2 weeks prior to when we had planned to submit our necessary document to request travel funds for our upcoming 2-day trip to the Grand Canyon/Discovery Telescope on the weekend of April 14-16. Therefore, we are contacting you to ask if the department would consider partially funding this event.

There a many hypotheses explaining how the solar system formed. In science class, we learned about three hypotheses explaining the formation of the solar system. We learned about the nebular, protoplanet, and planetisemal hypotheses.

The moon, similar to other stars, is in a perpetual motion. “The cycle of the phases and the Moon’s changing position against the stars are caused by the Moon’s orbital motion around the Earth.” (Thomas. Page 27) The Position of the Moon toward the Sun and the Earth determine its phases. In addition, when the Moon and the Earth are in the same line with the Sun, Eclipses can occur. During this Lab activity, I try to understand the phases of the Moon and Eclipses by studding the moon phase diagram and by simulating the Moon’s motions. The result of this simulation are presented in the next part of this document.

The size of the planet is calculated by using the normal brightness of the star and how much the brightness lowers when the planet orbits in front of it. The telescope also finds out if the planet is in a habitable zone, how many other stars are in its solar system, the planets properties, and its orbit pattern.

Discoveries of what were termed “nebulae” began in the early 17th century. The first of these discoveries was the Orion Nebula, which looked like a normal star to the naked eye. French scholar Peiresc discovered it in 1610 using one of the first telescopes to be made. Later, in 1656, Christiaan Huygens observed the interior of the Orion Nebula and determined that it consisted of a compact quadruple star system instead of a singular star. During the 18th and 19th century, nebulas were discovered even though astronomers were mainly scanning the sky for comets. Some major astronomers who contributed greatly to the discovery of nebulas, among other things, during the 18th and 19th century were Messier and the Herschel family. Though the instrumentation available to astronomers during the 18th and 19th century were highly advanced compared to earlier times, they weren’t advanced enough to detect the motion of extragalactic objects or their composition. This lack of precision instrumentation, and thus the dissociation from motion of stars/star-clusters/nebulae, were the main reasons astronomers during this

The Kepler spacecraft searches for transits, but ground-based Doppler spectroscopy and space-based astrometry are used to search for companion stars in planetary systems in order to gain a better understanding of their structure (NASA). The transit method requires an alignment of the planet’s orbit with the spacecraft, so that the planet will block a portion of its star’s light when a transit occurs. The dip in a planet’s brightness, that a photometer records, is directly proportional to the planet’s size. Furthermore, the atmosphere of the planet will absorb the star’s light at certain wavelengths. The light absorbed by the planet’s atmosphere is recorded by the photometer. Then, scientists can determine what molecules are in the atmosphere based on how much light is absorbed (Hall). Many details can be gathered from the transit; however, there are drawbacks to the transit method. NASA stated on Kepler’s webpage that, “The probability for an orbit to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit. This is 0.5% for a planet in an Earth-like orbit about a Sun-like star” (NASA). In order to compensate for this deficiency in the transit method, Kepler observes over 100,000

Their results stated that a large majority of the universe then was made up of hydrogen, the simplest element known to man with the atomic number of 1. This is a result of the first subatomic particles bonding together in a stable way. Eventually Helium was formed with the atomic number of 2; the second simplest element. Those same scientists found that around 27% percent of all matter in the universe was Helium. Today, the composition of all matter in our universe is staggeringly around 75% Hydrogen and 27% Helium, nearly the same as what the predicted. The Big Bang theory states that the simplest elements were made first(being hydrogen and Helium) and continues today, similarly to 13.7 billion years

Summary: This PR informs the readers about the companies that deal with various advanced types of telescopes

Astronomy (Before 500 BC) has been around since the first humans looked to the stars and wondered what the lights in the sky were. Many early cultures revolved around the stars in the sky, and the Mayan culture was one of the most successful, due to their long standing religions that are based off the sun, moon, and different seasons of the year. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in Wiltshire, England, scientists believed that this monument was used for predicting when the summer and winter solstices were going to happen, and making calendars for each year that would correctly present the seasons. Mayans believed that the stars in the night

A fundamental technique that is used for the exploration of exoplanets and their features, properties and components, is through spectroscopy. Through this technique, astronomers are able to discover new exoplanets, while also determining its composition, temperature, density, luminosity and rotation.