Intro to the Universe

The main objects in the universe are Galaxies, Quasars and Nebulae.
Galaxies is a vast collection of stars
-There are three types of galaxies
-elliptical
-Spiral
-Irregular

Quasars are very bright objects

-Very distant objects
Nebulae
-Misty pattern in the sky
-Stellar nurseries of stars
-Others are debris of supernovas
-Made from gas and dust
A planet is a celestial body that fits 3 requirements
-orbits a sun
-has sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic (nearly round) shape
-has cleared the neighborhoods around its orbit

The asteroid belt is between mars and Jupiter

Asteroids are rock bodies and can go up to 300km across and have an irregular shape
 Comets
 Frozen gas, ice and dust
 Smaller, just a few km across
 Follow highly elliptical path around sun
 Tail points away from sun
 Found
o Kuiper belt
o Oort cloud
Steller cluster

 Stars held together by gravitational attraction

 All stars were created about the same time
 Many thousands of stars in a cluster

Constellation

 Not recognizable if you move away

 A group of stars that form a recognizable pattern as viewed from earth
 Stars not relatable
 They are very bright

Our galaxy is 10^5 ly and is 10^6 ly away from the nearest one (from center to center)

Open cluster

 An open cluster us a group of up to a few hundred stars

 Formed from the same giant molecular cloud
 Roughly the same age
 More than 1,100 open cluster have been discovered within the milky way galaxy
 Contain younger stars < 10 B years
 Virgo is the closest cluster

Super cluster – globular

 A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbit a galactic core as a satellite
  Very tightly bound by brevity, very close
 100s of thousands of older stars
 Very little gas and dust
 Over 11 B years old
 Milky way and Virgo are a part of a super cluster

Retrograde motion
Is the motion of a planet going backwards but is an illusion and is caused by moving Earth
passing the outer planets in their orbits.

The nature of star

 Burn hydrogen to form helium

 Need very high temp and pressure needed in order to overcome coulomb repulsion
 Stars are formed by interstellar dust coming together through gravitational attraction

A new born star is called a protoster

Hydrostatic equilibrium
The loss in PE can, if mass is high enough, produce the high temp necessary for fusion
Equilibrium between radiation pressure outward and gravitational pressure inward – a stable
star.
Brown dwarfs are a failed star
White dwarf:

 Much smaller surface temp

 Much higher surface temp
 Does not produce energy
Red giants

 Considerably larger than sun

 Much lower SA temp than sun
Neutron star

 Completely made up of neutrons

 Remnants of supernova
Stars around the same mass as the sun eventually becomes white dwarfs
Stars with 4 – 8 times the mass of the sun eventually becomes neutron stars
Stars with more than 8 times the mass of the sun eventually becomes a black hole

Supernovae

 An enormous shock wave caused by the outer layer of a star falling rapidly inwards
 Much of the surface of the star will be torn away in a massive explosion
 In 1987 the star SK69202 in the large Magallanes Cloud went supernova
Black hole

 After gravitational collapse stars reach a density and radius that the gravitational
field at the surface of the stars will be strong enough to prevent EM radiation
 Spaghettification is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of a objects
into long thin shapes
Binary stars
For the naked eye they look as one and because of their orbit and if you have a telescope they
look like two. Sirius A is a main sequence star and Series B is a white dwarf.

29/8/19

Astronomical distance
book 645-646

A light year is the distance light travels in one year

1-mark for stating background stars
1-mark angle of parallax
1-mark for formula
d = distance to the star d=1/Ө
tan Ө = r/d  d= r/tan Ө
For small angles, tan Ө~Ө
Because angles in astronomy are tiny, we can use a approximation

A star is exactly one parsec (pc) away if the angle of parallax, Ө = 1 arcsecond (1/3600) ०

1 pc = 3.1 x 10^16m

How to convert ly into Au

9.46x10^15 : 1.496x10^11
63240 AU : 1

1 pc to m

1 : 3.0856 x 10^16 m

1 pc : 3.26 ly

1 pc : 206165 AU

Limitation to stellar parallax

 Can be used to measure Steller distances up to 100 pc (0.01 arcsec)

 Beyond this angle p is too small to measure efficiently
 Using a telescope placed beyond earth’s atmosphere van enable us to measure slightly
larger distances

2.7 x 2.06 x 10^5 = 5.6x10^5

1 pc = 3.26 ly 8.8 ly

1ly = 63240 Au
4.3 ly = x Au
X= 271932
P = 1/d = 1/271932 = 3.677x10^-6 rad
1 rad = arcsec/3600 =x

Other ways

Luminosity and Brightness

 Book: 647 – 648

Luminosity is total energy per time(s) emitted by a star in all directions. Luminosity of the sun is
3.90x10^26W

Apparent brightness b (Wm^-2)

B is proportional to 1/d^2 or B = L/4xd^2xπ (d is in meters and don’t forget to square it)

What does apparent brightness tell us

 Internal structure of the gas

 The age of the star
 Future evolution of a star

Two stars can have the same apparent brightness

Always assume that there are no way to earth and 1m^2 received equal amount of luminosity
______________________________________________________________________________

Stellar luminosity

All objects emit EM radiation at a range of frequencies

When the temp is increased

- Total energy radiated per second increases

- Increase in proportion of energy emitted at high frequencies
 A blackbody Is a theoretical object that absorbs all the frequencies falling on it.

The amount and type of EM radiation give off is directly proportional to their temperature.

Brightness

Blue is 250nm yellow = 500nm and red = 1000nm

Black body bellow 700K produce very little radiation at a visible wavelength.

Black body’s above this temperature start to produce radiation at visible wavelengths.

As temp increases, the peak wavelength decreases.

As the temperature increases, total energy emitted increases, because total area curve the curve
increase.

Law:

Luminosity L, Power P, Radius R, Surface temp T and 𝜎 steffan boldman constant

Wien’s law

To get the temperature :

Solution

To get the radius: