ASTRONOMY Prof. U.G.A. Puswewala, Department of Civil Engineering 1.0 Uses of field astronomy for engineering and surveying Astronomy means "The scientific study of the positions, distribution, motion, and composition of celestial bodies". For the purpose of this course, Astronomy can be defined as the science that treats of the heavenly bodies and of the position and motion of the earth in relation to them. A Civil Engineer, Mining Engineer or Surveyor would require astronomical observations for following tasks:- . (1). The determination of the true N-S direction, and hence the determination of azimuth of a line. (2). The determination of the latitude of the observer's position. )- The determination of the longitude of the observer's position, (4). Computation of the true time at any place. ‘The above tasks were mainly accomplished with the help of astronomy for centuries and thousands of years, including navigation over land and sea, prior to the advent of satellite- based GPS (Global Positioning System) in the mid-1980's, Accurate determination of the direction is important in many day-to-day affairs like navigation, as well as in major construction projects like Highways, Railways, Dams and Tunnels. Even though above listed tasks can now be.accomplished conveniently using the GPS, astronomy is still an important subject in order to understand the apparent motion of bodies in the universe including the daily apparent paths of objects like Sun, Moon, planets and stars across the sky, the occurrence of Seasons in the year, identification of different parts of the sky, variation of length of day-light and night time through the year and visibility of the part of sky (universe) depending on the observer's location on the Earth's surface, etc. 2.0 Arrangement in the Universe ‘The Universe (also called The Space, Cosmos) is an apparently limitless space, whose boundaries are unknown. Many hypotheses had been presented to suggest the shape of the universe. The Universe contains matter in different states (gas, liquid, and solid) depending on molecular bonding of atoms, The Universe is known to contain matter very sparsely (thinly scattered), and is mostly a vacuum. The matter is concentrated mostly in Galaxies; Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy: Page 1a Galaxy may contain millions or billions of stars, in addition to other objects like planets, satellites of planets, asteroids, comets, vast gas clouds and interstellar dust. There are millions of Galaxies in the Universe. Note: 1 million = 10° ;1 billion = 10° ;1 trillion = 10? 2.1 The Galaxies A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million (10) stars up to giants with one trillion (102) stars, all orbiting the galaxy’s centre of mass. Galaxies can also contain many multiple star systems, star clusters, and various interstellar clouds. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy; the Solar System includes the Earth and all the other objects that orbit the Sun. Tens of thousands of Galaxies have been photographed (through telescopes) in some detail, and they are classified into several main classes according to their shapes as: normal spiral, barred spiral, elliptical (Like a spiral’s nucleus, without arms), and irregular. All individual stars that are visible in the night sky belong to the Milky Way Galaxy. Other galaxies are too far away for any individual star to be distinguished. Figure 1: The photograph shows the full group of | Figure 2 The photograph shows the Andromeda galaxies Seyfert Sextet (a group of active galaxies | Galaxy (the next closest Galaxy to Milky Way, at a ‘emitting radio waves, X-rays and gamma-rays, in | distance of 22 million ight years) addition to light and other energy waves). 2.1 The Milky Way Galaxy The Solar System, centered around a star named the Sun, exists in a Galaxy named the Milky Way. The Milky Way Galaxy is a pinwheel-shaped spiral, containing upwards of —————————————e i Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy: Page 2100 billion stars, with an overall breadth of 100,000 light years (ly), and a central thickness of about 20,000 ly. (A light year is the distance light travels in one year, at the speed of nearly 300,000 km/sec, which is 9.4608x10!? km). The Sun, and the entire Solar System, including the Planet Earth, is located 30,000 ly away from the nucleus of the spiral. When we look towards the constellation Sagittarius, we look towards the nucleus of our Galaxy.; in the night sky, the Milky Way app a glowing, long, white cloud stretching across the sky, with its greatest thickness in the region of constellation Sagittarius. The external Galaxy closest to the Milky Way is the great Galaxy of Andromeda (known as Andromeda Galaxy, see Figure 2), the centre of which is 2.2 million ly away. The centre of Andromeda Galaxy is dimly visible to the naked eye, the collective glow of billions of stars at great distance from us, iF | Figure 3(a) and 3(b): The Milky Way Galaxy is a pinwheel-shaped spiral, containing upwards of 100 billion stars, with an overall breadth of 100,000 light years and a central thickness of about 20,000 light years, A light year is the distance light travels during one year at the speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second (of 186,000 miles per second (about 9,450,000,000,000 km or 5,870,000,000,000 miles). 2.2 The Stars Stars are giant, luminous spheres of plasma. There are billions of them, including our own Sun, in the Milky Way Galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies in the universe. A star develops from a giant slowly rotating cloud that is made up entirely or almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Due to its own gravitational pull, the cloud begins to collapse inward, and as it shrinks, it spins more and more quickly, with the outer parts becoming a disk while the innermost parts become a roughly spherical clump. This collapsing material grows hotter and denser, forming a ball-shaped protostar. When the heat and pressure in the protostar reaches about 1.8 million degrees F (1 million degrees C), atomic nuclei that normally repel each other start fusing together, and the star ignites Nuclear fusion converts a small amount of the mass of these atoms into massive amounts of energy. ee meena’ Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy : Page 3The life cycles of stars follow patterns based mostly on their initial mass, These include intermediate-mass stars such as the Sun, with half to eight times the mass of the sun, high- mass stars that are more than eight solar masses, and low-mass stars a tenth to half a solar mass in size. The greater a star's mass, the shorter is its life span. Objects smaller than a tenth of a solar mass do not have enough gravitational pull to ignite nuclear fusion, and some might become failed stars known as brown dwarfs. An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostar with a surface temperature of about 6,750 degrees F (3,725 degrees C). After hydrogen fusion starts, the result is a T-Tauri star, a variable star that fluctuates in brightness. This star continues to collapse for roughly 10 million years until its expansion due to energy generated by nuclear fusion is balanced by its contraction from gravity, after which point it becomes a main-sequence star that gets all its energy from hydrogen fusion in its core. The greater the mass of such a star, the more quickly it will use its hydrogen fuel and the shorter it stays on the main sequence. After all the hydrogen in the core is fused into helium, the star changes rapidly; without nuclear radiation to resist it, gravity immediately crushes matter down into the star's core, quickly heating the star. This causes the star's outer layers to expand enormously and to cool and glow red as they do so, rendering the star a red giant, Helium starts fusing together in the core, and once the helium is gone, the core contracts and becomes hotter, once more expanding the star but making it bluer and brighter than before, blowing away its outermost layers. After the expanding shells of gas fade, the remaining core is left, a white dwarf that consists mostly of carbon and oxygen with an initial temperature of roughly 180,000 degrees F (100,000 degrees C). Since white dwarves have no fuel left for fusion, they grow cooler and cooler over billions of years to become black dwarves too faint to detect. The Sun should leave the main sequence in about 5 billion years. A high-mass star forms and dies quickly. These stars form from protostars in just 10,000 to 100,000 years. While on the main sequence, they are hot and blue, some 1,000 to 1 million times as luminous as the sun and are roughly 10 times wider. When they leave the main sequence, they become a bright red supergiant, and eventually become hot enough to fuse carbon into heavier elements. After some 10,000 years of such fusion, the result is an iron core roughly 3,800 miles wide (6,000 km), and since any more fusion would consume energy instead of liberating it, its nuclear radiation can no longer resist the force of gravity. When the iron core of such a star reaches a mass of 1.4 solar masses, the result is a supernova. Gravity causes the core to collapse, making the core temperature rise to nearly 18 billion degrees F (10 billion degrees C), breaking the iron down into neutrons and neutrinos. In about one second, the core shrinks to about six miles (10 km) wide and then rebounds, sending a shock wave through the star that causes fusion to occur in the outlying layers. The star then explodes in a so-called Type II supernova. If the remaining stellar core was less than roughly three solar masses large, it becomes a neutron star made ——<— Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa ‘Astronomy : Page 4up nearly entirely of neutrons, and rotating neutron stars that beam out detectable radio pulses are known as pulsars. If the stellar core was larger than about three solar masses, no known force can support it against its own gravitational pull, and it collapses to form a black hole. i STELLAR TEMPERATURE: MONTE. 30000" 1O.0rC TENTS BoC Asay HG ts SUPERGIANTS -| lpn, Rig) i Re daar Pardee Genes | “Were telgeuse Adhard SUPERGIBNTS - ib] aL Mimosa} Canopus ge Alaris + Antares| I Ree Gacrux 2|__ Ach BRIGHT GIANT] : ce iadbarane I *, Algol Ibn Mira ‘Castor BIANTS— a Sirius Al |SUBGIANTS - IV z Fomaitaut°ARSI" sprodvon A 18 = $ MAIN tte lz MAIN g Sun [2 Centaur B Le /2 lB yoni A 3 2 8 1, Lalande 2 21185 Procyon 8 lBernara’s " ros ‘Vda Maanen's 28 Prokima’ se Genfauri®.- 7 [08 ee SSE 8 A F it SPECTRAL CLASS. sah HERTZSPRUNG- RUSSELL DIAGRAM Figure 4: Different star categories: Hertsprung-Russell Diagram to show the absolute magnitude of a star against its spectral class. SNe ed Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa ‘Astronomy : Page S2.2.1. Brightness and Magnitude Of the stars visible in the sky, all individual stars that are visible in the night sky belong to the Milky Way Galaxy. Other galaxies are too far away for any individual star to be distinguished. Of the stars that are visible in the sky, some are over a million times more luminous than the others, Stars can be arranged into five luminosity classes, each denoted by a Roman numeral, as follows (see Figure 4): Ia Most luminous supergiants IV Sub-giants Tb Less luminous supergiants V Main sequence II Bright giants ViSubdwarfs Ill Giants The brightness of a star is measured in ‘magnitudes’. One magnitude step means a brightness ratio of 2.512. This is so chosen that a 5-magnitude difference corresponds to a brightness ration of exactly 100. Thus a 6% magnitude star is exactly 100 times fainter than a 1* magnitude star. The larger the number, the fainter is the star. Stars that are brighter than magnitude 0 stars are given a negative magnitude. Apparent Magnitude: This indicates brightness in the sky. The faintest naked-eye stars are about magnitude 6. The brightest star in the sky is Sirius, with a magnitude of 1.47. A medium-sized telescope with a lens or mirror of 15 to 25 cm diameter will show stars of magnitude 13. The best ground-based telescopes can observe to about magnitude 24. Space-based telescopes are able to observe even fainter objects. In the night sky, the Moon and some planets of the solar system are brighter than the star Sirius. However, the Moon and other planets do not emit own light as the stars do, but merely reflect the sunlight falling on them. Their greater brightness (than stars) is due to their relative proximity to the earth, in comparison to the stars. Some brightness values are as follows: Table 1: Apparent brightness of objects in the Solar System. Moon 7126 Venus 44 | (atits brightest) Mars. 725 Jupiter =25 Mercury. -14 (at its brightest) Saturn 03 ‘Neptune, Uranus _| >+6.0 The Sun - 28 j| Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy: Page 6Absolute Magnitude: This indicates the luminosity of a star. It is the apparent magnitude it would have if viewed from a distance of 326 ly. The most luminous stars are about mag -7. Sun’s absolute magnitude is +4.8 (which is over 50,000 times fainter than the most luminous star). Some nearby stars with a luminosity of one millionth of the Sun’s luminosity have been detected. 2.2.2 Colour and Temperature of Stars Some stars have much greater temperature than the others, and the colour of a star depends on the temperature at the surface. Blue stars may have a surface temperature of 25,000 to 40,000 K; bluish-white stars 11,000 to 25,000 K; white stars 6,000 to 7,500 K; whitish-yellow stars (including the Sun) 5,000 to 6000 K; orange/red stars 3,500 to 5,000 K; and red stars may be below 3,000 K. 2.2.3 Distance to Stars Distance to stars are measured in light years. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, at the speed of nearly 300,000 km/sec, which is 94608x10!? km (or, at the speed of 186,000 miles/sec, which is 5.870x10"? miles), This is equal to 63,240 Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is defined as the average distance from the Earth to the Sun (which is equal to 149,598,770 km). The nearest stars to Earth are Proxima, Rigil A and Kent B (all three stars in the constellation of Centaurus) which are approximately 4.3 ly away. The brightest star Sirius A (in the constellation of Canis Major) is 87ly away. The two bright stars in the constellation of Orion, Rigel and Betelgeuse, are 850 ly and 650 ly away, respectively. The implication of these vast distances is that we see all the stars as they existed at some point in the past. For example, the brightest star in the constellation Orion, Rigel, is seen today as it existed 850 years ago. In reality, the night sky is a four dimensional space, called the space-time continuum (the fourth axis is the time axis). 2.24 Star sizes Star sizes vary greatly. Dying white stars are extremely small. The Sun, with a diameter of 1,392,000km, is much smaller than the giant or supergiant stars like Antares and Betelgeuse; Antares has a diameter of 800 times the diameter of the Sun, and Betelgeuse a diameter 1600 times the diameter of the Sun. However, the star masses do not vary by nearly as much as do their diameters; Betelgeuse has only about 20 times the mass of the Sun. (See Figure 5). — Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy: Page 7‘Table 2: The brightest stars in the sky; their brightness, type and distance THE BRIGHTEST STARS IN THE SKY. i Distance Star Constellation | Magnitude Type App. Abs. (Ly) Sirius (a) Canis Major |~1-47. 1-4. | Owart 87 Canopus (a) Carina -0-7 3 | Supergiant 110 Rigel Kent (a) Centaurus -0-3 -4 | Owarf 43 Arcturus (a) Bootes 04 3. | Giant 36 Vega (a) Lyra 0:0 6. | Dwarf 26 | Rigel (f) Orion 07 '0 | Supergiant 850 Capella (a) Auriga O14: 6+}. Giant 2345 Procyon (a) Canis Minor | 0-3 “6 | Subgiant 1 Achernar(a). Eridanus 0-5 6 | Subgiant 75 Hadai (f) Centaurus O68 4} Giant 330 Altair (a) Aquila 08. 1-9: | Giant “16 Acrux (a) Crux 0-8 9. | Subgiant 280 Betelgeuse (a) Orion (var) 0-8 *5''| Supergiant 650 Aldebaran (a) Taurus 0-9 “3° | Giant 65 Spica (a) ee 1:0.) —3:5°.)° Dwarf - 260 Antares (1) Scorpius (var)| 1-7 —4:5 | Supergiant 430 Pollux (/)) Gem 1150-2} Giant 35. | Fomalhaut (a) Piscis 1:20.47 [Dwarf 23-7) Austrinus $ phe Saget ‘ Mimosa (f) Crux . 4:2°-5-0 ] Giant 570 Deneb (a) Cygnus 24:35 =7-0:]"Supergiant. 1500. | Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa Astronomy: Page 82.2.4 Naming of Stars The stars are named by using a Greek alphabet letter followed by the name of the constellation to which the star belongs; a constellation is an (imaginary) group of stars, and the sky has been divided into 88 such constellations. The Greek letters are generally used in the alphabetical order in decreasing brightness of stars. Thus Alpha (a) is used for the brightest star in the constellation, Beta (B) for the next brightest, Gama (y) for the third brightest, and so on. In addition to this standard system, bright stars in the sky have been given their own names; e.g. Alpha Canis Major (a-Canis Major) is known as Sirius. 3.0 The Earth, the Sky, and the Celestial Sphere 3.1 The Earth The Earth can be considered as a sphere. It rotates from west to east around an axis, and revolves around the Sun. The axis of revolution is the axis joining the IN (Horth Pole) True (or Geographic) North Pole and the eg hhers True South Pole. "=: Nothern Meridians are great circles that pass 4 Hemisphere through poles of the earth and are TAL ST ap therefore at right angles to the equator. quater «Southern The equator and the prime meridian (one oe passing through the royal observatory at Greenwich, near London) are taken as 7h Figwe 6 anes of co-ordinates for determining the Aime, © (South Pole position of a point on the surface of the Gren) earth. See Figure 6. 3.2 The sky ‘The sky appears as a sphere of vast radius, particularly in the night-time. The ancients saw the stars as fixed points on this invisible sphere, known as the Celestial Sphere which revolved about the earth that seemed fixed. Today, this notion is still a convenient fiction by which we represent the movements of the stars and heavenly bodies. The stars in the sky become invisible in the day time, due to the scatter of sun-light by dust particles in the atmosphere of the Earth. Surveying Note: University of Moratuwa ‘Astronomy: Page 9