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Unanswered Questions

180 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
3 votes
0 answers
168 views

Combined mass of binary stars

This is Question 17 from USAAAO Practice Round 2015. The answer is D. It would be best if someone can detail out the workings. In a nearby star system, two stars are seen to orbit each other every ...
3 votes
0 answers
106 views

Can "rock stars" form from interstellar dust?

Imagine a large and massive dust cloud made of solid phase micrometeoroids, asteroids and larger planetoids, all material in it is in solid phase, and contains no hydrogen or other volatiles in gas ...
3 votes
0 answers
89 views

What maintains the high orbital eccentricity of many exo-planets near their sun?

Over the last decade we've discovered that many exoplanets not only have highly eccentric orbits, but also orbit very close to their sun. This is true of many classes of stars. I definitely have a ...
3 votes
1 answer
318 views

Mass of the universe

How do we calculate the mass of the universe taking into consideration dark matter? Mass of visible matter can be computed by stellar method, but how do we calculate mass of dark matter which we don'...
3 votes
0 answers
324 views

Total number density of galaxies and problematic expression in practise

This post comes from physics exchange forum, I have transfered it here, maybe I will be luckier since I have not received answers on the other forum. Here is the issue : I am asked to give the ...
3 votes
0 answers
115 views

Average effect of a planet on a comet

I'm considering a problem involving star S, planet A, and a comet B. The orbits of the planet and comet are eccentric, with eccentricities $e_A$ and $e_B$. I'm trying to calculate the average change ...
3 votes
0 answers
188 views

What is the spectral power output of a typical galaxy?

I'm looking for a function which gives the typical isotropic spectral power of light emitted by an entire galaxy on the whole electromagnetic spectrum (in watts per frequency unit), as a function of ...
3 votes
0 answers
2k views

What is meant by ionization states?

I am going through the theory of Saha equation but I am not able to understand the concept of ionisation state? What are ionization states actually?
3 votes
0 answers
60 views

Linear motion in the equatorial frame

I would like to calculate how the RA/Dec changes when an object has an apparent linear motionin the equatorial sphere. For example, more or less what an artificial satellite would do in a circular ...
3 votes
0 answers
333 views

Angular momentum in planetary disk formation

Reading about the formation of planetary disks, one of the major problems, it seems like, is the evacuation of angular momentum. Aparently planets can't form with the amount o angular momentum the ...
2 votes
0 answers
84 views

Would we know if the universe was rotating?

I was wondering what we would observe if the universe had a small rotation. My conclusion was that galaxies on the equatorial plane of the universe would be slightly more redshifted than galaxies than ...
2 votes
0 answers
102 views

What would the Big Crunch theoretically look/feel like?

In the Big Crunch theory, the expansion of the universe reverses, resulting in all matter contracting into a single point. Imagine you are alive at the time of this event. What would the sky look like?...
2 votes
0 answers
34 views

Local anisotropies in the expansion of the universe and tidal forces...?

In the context of the large-scale structure of the universe, there can be local anisotropies (https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/05/aa40296-21/aa40296-21.html). I understand from this ...
2 votes
0 answers
80 views

Understanding laplace plane (satellite) orbits

Working on a little project (with vex+python in houdini) to calculate the planet and satellite positions using the keplerian formulae and a database of orbital elements and progressions. Primarily ...
2 votes
0 answers
70 views

How is an index of n=0 possible for the Lane-Emden equation?

I was recently showing that an index of $n=0$ for the Lane-Emden equation results in constant density throughout the star. However, in my calculations I had to use the constant $\alpha$ which can be ...

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