Unanswered Questions
212 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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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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 ...
6
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What is the reason for the dispute over the variation of core mass with heavy metal abundance?
In Metal-Poor Stars IV: The Evolution of Red Giants, Rood writes
The differences in the results of these papers are large enough to introduce appreciable uncertainties into the study of the ...
6
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1
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189
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Do narrow lines in the spectra of O- and B- type stars always indicate magnetic fields?
I was reading a paper on the differential emission measures of a set of hot O- and B- type stars. As the authors discuss in Section 3 (page 959), two stars, $\tau$ Sco and $\theta^1$ Ori C, have ...
6
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510
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Could non-supernova carbon, oxygen, or silicon flashes be observed?
I was reading about the helium flash, the short but sudden onset of helium fusion in certain red giant stars. As I understand, the upper (nondegenerate) layers of the star absorb the energy as they ...
5
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Type Ia supernova by fallback?
Is it possible for a massive star of more than 1.4 solar masses (probably around 3 or more but below the threshold for type II) to collapse into a white dwarf and a planetary nebula, then go supernova ...
5
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79
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Obtaining the derived period of $\omega$ Canis Majoris
I have read these two papers:
On the nature of the Be phenomenon I. The case of ω Canis Majoris
Stellar and circumstellar activity of the Be star ω CMa
II. Periodic line-profile variability
In the ...
5
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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 (...
5
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How often do comet occultations of stars happen?
By travelling to specific places, astronomers can see three thousand star comet transition events every year at m15 for the major (50km+) comets and asteroids averaging about 20 seconds, perhaps that'...
5
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How is the age of a star on the Henyey track calculated?
I was reading Stellar Evolution in Early Phases of Gravitational Contraction, by Chushiro Henyey, where he writes,
If $L \propto R^{-\alpha}$ along the path, the age of a star from the time when $R=...
4
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'Star' appeared dimmer and dimmer over multiple days before disappearing. What could this have been?
This happened a little while ago but I've just been thinking about it!
I was in Wales for a holiday, and over the period of 7 days, a particularly bright 'star'(or at least a bright dot that looked ...
4
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425
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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.
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4
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What is the contribution of star-produced axions to the dark matter budget of the Milky Way?
I try to follow the discussion of axions since Peccei, Quinn, Wilzcek and Weinberg. What I still don't understand is how much the speculated stellar production of axions could add to the galactic dark ...
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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 ...