Sunday, December 4, 2011

Spiral Arms In a Star's Disk Leads To Planets

Credit: www.futurity.org
Picture above shows a disk of gas and dust circulating around a Sun-like star. A structure like spiral arms could mean the existence of planets which haven't been detected yet. Computer simulation has shown that gravitational force from a planet in the disk could disturb the trajectory of gases and dusts which form spiral arms.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Looking For Light Pollution But Not From This Earth

Earth at Night
Credit: C. Mayhew & R. Simmon (NASA/GSFC), NAA/NGDC, DMSP Digital Archive

Astronauts orbiting the Earth often look upon our planet illuminated by lights in night zone. Researchers start to think that scientists should be able to detect light from other civilizations too. Many scientific fictions had ever dreamed about a planet filled with illuminated cities, for example, the galaxy's capital like Coruscant from Star Wars.

Dance of a star: Part III - (Problem 7-8)

by Mee Wong-u-railertkun, David Vartanyan, John Pharo

Credit: www.wikipedia.com
We present the solution to problems from the worksheet "Planet Host Stars Wobble But They Don't Fall Down" (which could be found here.) The outline of this worksheet is as following. First, we are going to see how a planet affects the movement of a star. From that knowledge, we can observe this "weird" characteristic of a star to find exoplanets. In this post, we present solution to question seven and eight.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Dance of a star: Part II - (Problem 4-6)

by Mee Wong-u-railertkun, David Vartanyan, John Pharo

Credit: ESO
We present the solution to problems from the worksheet "Planet Host Stars Wobble But They Don't Fall Down" (which could be found here.) The outline of this worksheet is as following. First, we are going to see how a planet affects the movement of a star. From that knowledge, we can observe this "weird" characteristic of a star to find exoplanets. In this post, we present solution to question four to six.

Dance of a star: Part I - (Problem 1-3)

by Mee Wong-u-railertkun, David Vartanyan, John Pharo

We present the solution to problems from the worksheet "Planet Host Stars Wobble But They Don't Fall Down" (which could be found here.) The outline of this worksheet is as following. First, we are going to see how a planet affects the movement of a star. From that knowledge, we can observe this "weird" characteristic of a star to find exoplanets. In this post, we present solution to question one to three.