Questions tagged [fundamental-astronomy]
Questions involving reference frames, time scales, and how they are determined. Not for general Astronomy 101 questions.
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How to know that the 21cm Hydrogen line is the actual emission and not any other redshifted line?
Is it possible that we mistake some other wavelength emission to be 21 cm because of redshift?
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Does anyone knows the origin of the Maunder Minimum and Dalton minimum?
Solar spots seams to be a good indicator of solar activity. Does anyone know the reason for the Maunder and Dalton minima?
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Nodes and declinations of Moon
This nice page from NASA has the possibility to create an astronomical events calendar for a certain period. I tried to do that for the year 2017 for Central Europe. What comes out puzzles me:
On ...
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applying nutation to ecliptical coordinates (apparent position of star)
I'm trying to calculate RA and DEC with nutation correction. The direct calculation in MEEUS Page 151 can't be used for stars close to celestial poles and I thought I'd turn RA/DEC into ecliptical ...
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Who is considered as the father of modern astronomy? [closed]
Googling is giving me both Galileo Galilei and Nicolas Copernicus as the answer. I am sorry and will remove this question if it is an opinion based question.
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The M-theory to understand black holes [closed]
I am a layman in astronomy. Can someone please explain it to me whether the M-theory can be used to explain what is happening in the centre of the black hole where the singularity exists? Or is it ...
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How long would it take to collect a certain amount of photons? [closed]
So, I've received this question to solve, it's not a very advanced one, though advanced enough to cause headaches.
The situation is as follows:
Say, you are observing with a telescope with an ...
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What's the useful magnification for a scope with 70mm objective lens?
Some of the spotting scopes which are e.g. 70mm claim to magnify terrestrial objects at 75x. But yet they cannot produce sharp and clear images at even 30x-35x.
While 90mm scopes can do a better job ...
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Does an algorithm exist that takes an image of the night sky and tell you where in the milky way that perspective likely originates? [duplicate]
In Stargate they talk about using the stars on other planets to figure out their location. I know that's fiction, but it made me wonder if such an algorithm (with arguably little usefulness right now) ...
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Can some stars not emit any energy in the visible spectrum?
Stars convert mass into energy. Even converting the slightest mass into energy is immense because the speed of light is so great and $E = mc^2$. This means that stars have to emit large amounts of ...
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Why the Hubble constant is so inconsistent?
Having a look on Wikipedia I noticed the following values (of the last 6 years) for the Hubble constant:
67.6±0.7 SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
73.00±1.75 Hubble Space ...
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How to discover Neptune from the Uranus orbit (by computer simulation)
I would like to demonstrate the existence of another planet (Neptune) by studying the discrepancy between the observation of the Uranus orbit and the mathematical prediction, this work was made from ...
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Could space time curve from the vantage point of earth and out into the universe, and would d = 1 / P in that case give false estimates?
The seventeenth century saw a revolution in astronomy. The invention of the telescope and the acknowledgement of the heliocentric system triggered a race amongst astronomers to measure the parallax of ...
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Frequency of transit in planar and non-planar planetary systems
Supposing that another planetary system is in one plane like our solar system, if let's say that the transit of one planet is visible then is it safe to also assume that all planets in the system must ...
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does a minority of all planetary systems show transits?
do most or only a minority of all planetary systems to show transits?
I feel like its minority due to the random orientation of their orbits?
But the thing is I seem to find conflicting information.
...
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