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Unanswered Questions

191 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
10 votes
0 answers
214 views

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 ...
7 votes
0 answers
256 views

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 ...
6 votes
0 answers
194 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 ...
6 votes
1 answer
189 views

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 ...
5 votes
0 answers
70 views

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? ...
5 votes
0 answers
186 views

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 ...
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 ...
5 votes
0 answers
62 views

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 (...
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
60 views

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 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
60 views

How are plage regions related to the density of medium and velocity FeII ions?

During a literature review (abstract), I found that the intensity of FeII (298.5 nm) ions in the last solar minimum was higher than the two previous solar minima 21 & 22. The velocity of FeII ions ...
4 votes
0 answers
113 views

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'...
4 votes
0 answers
66 views

What can Jupiter's spectrograph tell us other than its rotational velocity?

I have data of a Jupiter's image and the spectra of each pixel in the image, and I am playing around to see what I can do with it. I have managed to find Jupiter's rotational velocity by finding the ...

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