Unanswered Questions
206 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
7
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Gravitational eddies across the galaxy?
I read about natural gravitational eddies that travel in a wave that black holes have. They also have a strong magnetic field. Does those eddies follow magnetic field lines of the rotating black hole? ...
6
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0
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99
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How many galaxies are currently merging?
On the homepage of the galaxies research group at CfA SAO, it states, "Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with others." They do not provide a ...
6
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0
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194
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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 ...
6
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0
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119
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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
votes
1
answer
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 ...
5
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0
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86
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Did the density wave theory for spiral arms take account of this phenomenon?
I came across this link. In it the author speculates that in the outer region of a galaxy, the spiral arms overtake the stars, and vice versa for the inner region. That means there must be a middle ...
5
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0
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88
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Significantly blueshifted Lyman-$\alpha$
Lyman-$\alpha$ line in galaxies is notably known to show a double peaked profile, mainly due to its scattering in a moving medium, see e.g., the very recent Matthee et al. 2021, The X-SHOOTER Lyman-α ...
5
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49
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What happens with a globular cluster when it passes through a galactic disc?
The orbits of globular clusters are crossing the disks of their galaxies, so they should sometimes pass through the disks. Are there any observed fluctuations in the clusters and in the disks ...
5
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457
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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 ...
5
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0
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54
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Why Tidal Tails in Disk Galaxies, but not in Ellipticals?
Why do tidal tails result from only disk galaxies but not ellipticals.
I understand that tidal tails are results of gravitational interactions not strong enough to completely plunge out the material ...
5
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0
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719
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Which galaxy is closest to the center of the KBC void?
I was reading up on Bootes void and came across this list of the largest voids in the visible universe, and apparently the one we're in, the KBC void, is not only the biggest, but damned-near ...
4
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52
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How does SDSS estimate photometric redshift of sources?
I'm looking through the data in SDSS DR 12:
...
4
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0
answers
54
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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 ...
4
votes
0
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60
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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
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107
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Reasons for extremely high number density of galaxies at low redshift
I am currently analyzing the SDSS data especially in the extremely low redshift area, in order to measure the cosmological statistics. What I mean by extremely low is z<0.1. One peculiarity that I ...