Skip to main content

Unanswered Questions

100 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
6 votes
0 answers
193 views

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 ...
6 votes
0 answers
119 views

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 ...
5 votes
0 answers
457 views

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 ...
4 votes
0 answers
410 views

Calculation of average FWHM by PSF fitting of all the detected stars in the fits image

I need to calculate the FWHM of all the stars detected via the DaoStarFinder package/any other package by performing PSF fitting in Python. Here is the code for my detection. ...
4 votes
0 answers
42 views

Fitting a line or polynomial to optical and radio SEDs

I've been trying to fit functions to plots showing photometric data for AGN from both optical and radio measurements, such as: but my supervisor says that this shouldn't be done; the radio and ...
4 votes
0 answers
52 views

How does SDSS estimate photometric redshift of sources?

I'm looking through the data in SDSS DR 12: ...
4 votes
0 answers
54 views

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 ...
4 votes
0 answers
71 views

K-correction vs resizing photometric bands

Is there a difference between a K-correction (see Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_correction) and simply "resizing" the bands, e.g. the 2-10 keV x-ray band, with the redshift? I've read ...
4 votes
0 answers
581 views

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 ...
4 votes
0 answers
56 views

How is the roll of the Hubble telescope around its axis and the dispersive direction(s) of it's spectrometer(s) managed?

Reading Dupree et al. 2020 Spatially Resolved Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse (also in arXiv and summarized in Phys.org's Hubble finds that Betelgeuse's mysterious dimming ...
4 votes
0 answers
69 views

How significant is the effect of galactic rotation on line broadening of carbon monoxide?

In class the other day, we were discussing observations of rotational transitions of carbon monoxide, namely, the $J=1\to0$ and $J=2\to1$ lines. We originally had assumed that both lines would have ...
4 votes
0 answers
210 views

How to calculate magnitudes in photometry?

I have a passband filter $b$ and a spectrum (SED) $f_{\lambda}(\lambda)$. Often the formula I find to get the flux in that filter $F_b$ is $$F_{b}=\dfrac{\int f_{\lambda}(\lambda) T_{b}(\lambda)d\...
3 votes
0 answers
41 views

Why MIT's Benjamin Rackham says "nearby ultracool dwarf SPECULOOS-3" would look "purplish-red, spotted, and flaring" from an airless orbiting planet?

May 15, 2024 MIT News article Newly discovered Earth-sized planet may lack an atmosphere includes the following: “We can say from our spectra and other observations that the star has a temperature of ...
3 votes
0 answers
51 views

How do you calculate the reddening corrections for photometry?

I have photometric data from Gaia for a star and am trying to de-redden the colors. I need to find the reddening corrections for the photometry. I have photometry for G, BP, and RP. To start I am ...
3 votes
0 answers
101 views

SExtractor parameters for identifying Star Forming regions

I am using SExtractor (Source Extractor) to identify Star-Forming regions in a galaxy. The problem is I am unable to choose the parameters required for it. SExtractor is just a tool to identify the ...

15 30 50 per page
1
2 3 4 5
7