APOD 3.5

Star Size Comparisons
February 22, 2011

I chose this APOD because I thought that it was a really good eye opener to just how big stars are. We are studying stars right now and how they are formed, so I found this to be perfect. The Sun is not a large star by any means. Our G2 star is just average on the main sequence. Stars, like Antares can get huge! Red Super-giants are the biggest stars that we know of so far, being very large, but not very hot. Stars that are huge take a shorter time to form when compared to small stars. Gas and dust collapse on themselves and form a dense center. After millions of years, the nebula forms a photosphere, now officially being a protostar. Then, the center heats up even more so that nuclear fusion can occur.  Once the protostar has nuclear fusion, the protostar is a star. The star will stay on the main sequence for 90% of its life, where there won't be much change. The other 10% is where it gets interesting. The universe is an immense blackness covered in stars and galaxies, as well as nebulae and planets. The human race will most likely never be able to discover and see everything in space, but we have a good idea how large it can get.  :)

Maria Mitchell Biography

Maria Mitchell Biography

      Maria Mitchell was born in 1818 in Massachusetts. She was the third of ten children and was, for the most part, taught by her father.  She is also the first cousin four times removed of Benjamin Franklin. Her father began teaching Maria astronomy very early. Since her family was Quakers, they believed firmly in the importance of education, although in 1842, Mitchell converted to Unitarianism. But anyways, Maria was able to achieve an education equal to that of a male. This helped to spur Maria into becoming an educated women and set up the building blocks to become a great woman. By the age of 12, Maria was calculating the exact movements of an annular eclipse.

       When Mitchell was 18 years old, she acquired the job of a librarian at Nantucket Athenaeum. Mitchell kept up with this job for some 26 years while all the while still managing to look up at the heavens. In October 1847 at the age of 29, Mitchell spotted a new comet, Miss. Mitchell's Comet. The King of Denmark awarded her a gold medal that made Mitchell world famous because she was only the second woman to be awarded this impressive prize.  From 1849 until 1868, Maria worked at the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office charting the positions of Venus. In 1865, Maria was hired as a faculty member of the all woman's college, Vassar Female College.  Here, she was a teacher of math and astronomy. Most of the other professors thought that is was interesting for an unmarried woman to be a teacher. Mitchell challenged her students with lots of reading and writing assignments. Mitchell wanted to give the young women the best education that they could get. Very soon, Maria started to work for Women's Rights. She formed an Association where hundreds of women professionals gathered, and soon became president of the association. She had to resign, though,  from the Nautical Office because her job at the college needed her full attention. Maria Mitchell also participated in many prestigious clubs and organizations as well as being the director of the Observatory at Vassar College. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Women are just a few of the associations that Mitchell took part in. 

      While at Vassar College, Mitchell became the first professor of astronomy. She ended up retiring from the college in 1888, and dying the next year on June 28th. Although Mitchell lived for 71 years, her legacy is still visible today. The Maria Mitchell Observatory is located in Nantucket Island. It was founded by American women that wanted the memory of Maria Mitchell to remain alive. There is also a public school located in Denver, Colorado named after her, as well as a crater on the moon.  Another example of a tribute to Maria is the World War II liberty ship called the SS Maria Mitchell. As you can see, Maria is a genius woman who put heart into her work. Without Maria Mitchell, the notion of woman astronomers probably would have been delayed, and some discoveries would not have been made since she helped to encourage women into the science field.
   

Stargaze 2-20-11

Service Road behind building
7:20-9:15 PM

I brought my telescope and tried to work it, but there was no luck in finding Jupiter. We only had a limited amount of time since Jupiter is already very low on the horizon. We did however manage to find M42, the Orion Nebula, and view it using our telescope. After seeing the nebula through the 20mm eyepiece, we switched to the other more magnified eyepiece and saw a much closer view. Gabi and I also took turns trying to identify constellations and stars. It's a lot harder then it looks! The sky is much larger then what we anticipated. We thought that the constellations would be a lot smaller, but when Mr. P showed us the first constellation, Eridanus, we were way off. The constellations are a lot more spread out across the sky. But finally I now able to recognize some of the constellations that we've been learning. Before, I could point them all out to you on paper, but now I have had the chance to see what they look like on a clear night. Thanks Mr. P for your help with the telescope!

APOD 3.4

The Rosette Nebula
February 14, 2011

I picked this photo because I saw it very fitting that it was one of the objects for this week. One of the two constellations of the week is Monoceros. The Rosette Nebula happens to be located in this desolate constellation where no bright stars are visible. The Rosette Nebula is a beautiful nebula that is home to an open cluster of fairly new stars. These stars are approximately 4 million years old, young in the eyes of a star. The gas and dust around the stars is slowly being pushed away from the cluster because of the emanating solar wind. The actual nebula though, is an emission nebula, meaning that the stars are exciting the gas around them causing the gas to glow. The nebula is a HUGE marvel. It measures 100 light years across! That's 588 trillion miles! The nebula can be seen with a small telescope, so maybe next time I'm out with mine, I try and look for it.

Astonomy Cast "Exotic Life"

This podcast was created shortly after NASA's finding of arsenic making bacteria. This bacteria was found in California. The lake that the bacteria was found in, was highly polluted with arsenic. This is the reason why the bacteria and is believed to be able to replace phosphorus with arsenic in making and replicating DNA. People were getting excited that arsenic life forms might be out in space. The reason why the switch from phosphorus to arsenic was possible, is because both elements have 5 valence electrons. This means that there is still 3 space for other electrons, and thus a great window of bonding opportunities. The main part of the bacterium is still made out of carbon. There still has been no find of life without the use of Carbon. Other places in the solar system have been searched for other life. Titans, one of the moons of Saturn, has an abundance of methane. The temperature on Titan is at methane's triple point, or the temperature in which all three states of Methane can exist at the same time. In my opinion, there is a possibility that life might exist elsewhere in the universe. The finding of arsenic to me is only a matter of the pollution that happened in the lake. Pollution can cause life to behave in crazy ways and mutate, which is what happened. NASA should not have made the giant claim about this huge new finding.

Astonomy Cast "Albedo"

This podcast was all about albedo of the amount of light that is able to be reflected off of an object. The object with the most albedo is snow and ice. Snow and ice is very good at reflecting the light that hits it. Some objects in space, like Eris, have even been discovered only because of the albedo of a nearby planet.  Albedo can refer to any wavelength, but the most common is visible. The reflected light from the object's albedo causes heat to escape the Earth. As the polar ice caps melt though, the soil underneath is revealed and the light from the Sun is not reflected, but absorbed. Thus, albedo is a very important factor in regulating the Earth's temperature. Albedo is also helpful in determining the composition of other objects in space. The albedo can be used to measure the rate at which an body of mass is rotating. The amount of shininess can also tell how new the ice is on an object. The more shinny the object is, the newer the ice. Albedo is a great help in determing many aspects of celestial objects.

Works Cited for Maria Mitchell

"Mitchell, Maria." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 9. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.  421-422. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Sarasota County Public Schools. 14 Feb. 2011

"Maria Mitchell." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Vol. 11. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 61. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Sarasota County Public Schools. 14 Feb. 2011

DEROCHE, CELESTE. "Mitchell, Maria." American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Ed. Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. Vol. 3. 2^nd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 151-152. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Sarasota County Public Schools. 14 Feb. 2011 

Kohlstedt, G. Sally. Maria Mitchell: The Advancement of Women in Science. The New England Quarterly, Inc. 1978. Database, Web. 24 Feb. 2011

APOD 3.4

Star Colors in Orion
February 11, 2011

This photo seemed especially fitting because of the current topic of study in class. It's funny that we were just studying about properties of stars and that their spectra are changed from different factors of interstellar space and movement of the stars, and that today's pictures talks about just that. Obviously the main difference in the stars of this picture are the different colors. The upper left star of the constellation Orion is red because that star is a red giant. The color difference is caused by the temperature difference of the stars. The red color means that the star is cool. The blue color corresponds to a very hot temperature. The color of the stars can be messed up with the interstellar dust particles and the gas. Sometimes, the color of the star will look completely different. Stars are so far away, yet they can shine thousands of light years away. The star of Betelgeuse is so large, that the orbit would reach out to Jupiter if it was superimposed in place of the Sun. Stars are amazing features of our Solar System that should have more time devoted to studying them. 

APOD 3.3

Six Worlds For Kelper-11
February 3, 2011

This diagram represents the newly found "solar system" by the Kepler space craft. The star in the center is much like our own Sun, but the orbits aorund it are far less in size. Most of the orbits by the exoplanets are within teh orbit of Mercury. There is probably little chance for life there since the temperatures are so extreme. The new planets are in the constellation Cygnus, 2000 light years away. Three planets were transitting the newly found planetary system at the same time! This has never before been discovered. In the 1/400th section of the sky that the Kepler space craft was looking at, it happened to find the new "solar system." This means that there are probably millions of other planets orbitting around the stars that surround our Solar System. NASA has announced that they ahve found at least 50 planets that lie in the habitable zone. These planets range form Earth sized planets to Jupiter sized planets. We've still got a long way to go until we have studied and searched our galaxy through to see if there are anymore planets that are habitable to life. Also, once we're done with our galaxy, what's next? Should we star on the next?