Wednesday, April 30, 2008

 

New Understanding of Jets from Black Holes

In class the other day, I talked about our how we had relatively little data about how jets are produced by black holes. The following news release suggest that this has changed recently. Radio astronomers are now able to detect a corkscrew magnetic field that funnels particles out of the accretion disk before they enter a black hole.

http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2008/bllac/

# posted by Tony Crider @ 6:53 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, April 24, 2008

 

In the News

A few cool articles came out recently related directly to some of your research projects. The first celebrates Hubble's birthday with the release of a lot of cool galaxies. That latter talks about using the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (the next-generation DSS) to look for asteroids.

http://www.wired.com/science/space/multimedia/2008/04/gallery_hubble

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/04/planetary_protection.php

# posted by Tony Crider @ 4:09 AM 0 Comments

Friday, April 11, 2008

 

Homework 7

Here is the next set of homework problems. These are all (IMHO) relatively straight-forward. I would suggest starting on them and asking my question about them early, since Exam 2 will be on April 16.

HW 7 (due April 14): 19.8, 19.10, 22.8, 22.11, 23.4, 23.6

# posted by Tony Crider @ 5:46 AM 0 Comments

Monday, April 7, 2008

 

Stellarium

At the end of class today, I suggested that some of you use the desktop planetarium software, Stellarium. Freely available at www.stellarium.org, this program will show you what is visible in the sky from different locations on the Earth at different times. I highly recommend trying it out if you haven't already.

# posted by Tony Crider @ 9:19 AM 0 Comments

Sunday, April 6, 2008

 

Rubric for Evaluation of Talks

Here's the rubric I will use for evaluating the talks, in case you were curious. (It is nearly identical to the one I used in PHY 271, for those of you that took that class.)


PresentationEvaluation371.pdf

You can also access my PHY 102 slides to get ideas for your own presentations at:

http://physics.elon.edu/~acrider/classes/phy102/lectures/

# posted by Tony Crider @ 7:06 PM 0 Comments
 

Ham's Peanut Star Discovered!

As some of you may remember, during our discussion of binary stars in class, Ham Clark was asking questions about stars that actually touch each other rather than simply orbiting each other. While catching up on astronomy blogs this weekend, I read an article about a recently discovered binary star system where this very rare configuration actually takes place!

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/superyellow.htm

# posted by Tony Crider @ 5:07 AM 0 Comments

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

 

Homework 6

We've got a relatively short homework set for Chapter 7. Please submit them as Excel files on Blackboard in the Assignments section.

HW 6 (due April 9): Problems 7.16, 7.17

# posted by Tony Crider @ 7:12 AM 0 Comments
 

Updated Schedule

I've updated the course schedule to include the talks that you will give during the rest of the semester. I strongly encourage you to show my your slides as soon as possible so I can give you feedback. The final version should be submitted to the Digital Dropbox by midnight on the night before the presentation. These presentations count as 5% of your research project grade. The remaining 10% will depend on what you have at the very end of the semester.

Schedule371-S20080402.pdf

# posted by Tony Crider @ 7:01 AM 0 Comments

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