Astrophysics with Crider

On Wednesday this week, we will meet in MCMI 321 where I will talk briefly about black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. We will then review the status of each group's project. I will also assign an official (temporary) grade to let you know where you stand with the project based on your work-to-date.

On Friday, I will be speaking at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington. While I am away, I have asked the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning to interview you about the astrophysics course. Please plan to meet the interviewer in AVTL 201 at our regular class meeting time.

Here is an updated version of the class schedule for your convenience.
Schedule-PHY371-S20080505.pdf

We talked a lot about supernova in class last week. I mentioned the difficulty in simulating these on a computer. Apparently, it is getting a little bit easier. While I've seen 2-D simulations before, these new 3-D simulations are simply amazing.

http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1354

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/

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

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

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.

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/