Unanswered Questions
189 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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How well conserved is etendue in extreme gravitational lensing scenarios?
This excellent answer to Could dark matter exist in the Universe in the form of sufficiently dense objects? includes the following image and description:
Light from the background galaxy circles a ...
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7
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Get the expression of probed volume between 2 redshifts
1) I can't manage to find/justify the relation (1) below, from the common relation (2) of a volume.
2) It seems the variable r is actually the comoving distance and not comoving coordinates (with ...
CommunityBot
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What are the pros and cons of different types of echelle spectrograph cross-dispersers?
Echelle spectrographs, operating at high resolving power, typically consist of an echelle grating with a low numbers of lines/mm, used with high diffraction orders (often $n=$50-100). To separate the ...
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6
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Need help understanding stellar spectroscopy data from ESO
The European Southern Observatory webpage has a web page that has tabular spectrogram data from A. J. Pickles, University of Hawaii. There are over 130 .dat files there. Each one represents a ...
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Do all the accretion disks around a compact object (black hole or neutron star) emit astrophysical jet outflow?
Do all the accretion disks around a compact object (black hole or neutron star) emit astrophysical jet outflow? I mean is it mandatory for a jet to be emitted from an accretion disk?
If so, then why?
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Explain as simply as possible how the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect is used to estimate the Hubble constant
The Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect (SZ effect) is useful in determining the Hubble constant because it is independent of the cosmic distance ladder. This effect occurs when CMB (cosmic microwave background) ...
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What are some good books/online resources for astronomy problem sets?
I am currently studying for the international olympiad for astronomy and astrophysics (the syllabus can be found here: https://www.ioaastrophysics.org/syllabus/). I am currently using Carroll Ostlie's ...
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Why does titanium oxide around Betelgeuse produce this particular sawtooth-shaped absorption spectrum?
Betelgeuse Just Isn’t That Cool: Effective Temperature Alone Cannot Explain the Recent Dimming of Betelgeuse suggests that the recent dimming might be caused by increased optical absorption by dust ...
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Strength of core-envelope coupling in stars
For a star with a given Zero-Age Main Sequence (ZAMS) mass, as a function of metallicity how strongly is the star's core coupled to its envelope?
I understand that the core-envelope boundary is only (...
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4
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CMBR: Is the cold spot a hint at the edge of the universe?
Could the big cold spot in the CMBR map be a sign that almost all radiation from that direction has already passed us, and that be a sign that the end of the universe is closest to earth in that ...
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4
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How does SDSS estimate photometric redshift of sources?
I'm looking through the data in SDSS DR 12:
...
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Explanation for Planck 2018 temperature fluctuations strongest peaks
As it can be seen from Plank 2018 Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations data-
There are 3 sharp peaks at multipole expansions $\ell \approx 250, 550, 800 $. Also as multipole expansion ...
4
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What happens to the non-fusion formed metals in stars?
Let’s consider a population I star of some given metallicity.
I know that depending on the type of star, different structures are possible with convection zones and radiative zones trading around ...
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How much more mass would Mars need to currently have enough pressure for liquid water and oxygen?
My question is whether Mars just about failed to meet the threshold or missed it by a lot. It's been dry for 3 billion years. How much bigger would it have needed to be to buy it that extra time? Let'...
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A simple echelle spectrograph for viewing solar spectrum
On the Astrosurf website here, someone has designed a deceptively simple echelle spectrograph for viewing solar spectrum. Briefly, light from an optical fiber falls on an echelle grating and which is ...
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