APOD 4.1

Stephan's Quintet Plus One

This image of Stephan's Quintet was formulated with data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the Subaru Telescope. Only 4 of the 5 galaxies are locked in a "cosmic dance", the closest galaxies being 300 million light years away. They all have distorted loops and tails spawning out of their shape due to gravitational tides. Stephan's quintet is within the boundaries of the Pegasus constellation. NGC 7320C is the galaxy that is all the way to the left that is the outlier. This is an incredible image because it shows a distance of 500 million light years and understates how large these galaxies truly are.

Astronomy Night Observations

On March 1st I attended the Astronomy Night from 7-9pm and it was one of the clearest night skies I have observed in the past month. I used the Sky Map app to observe winter/spring time constellations such as Orion, Taurus, Auriga, Canis Major, and Gemini. I was able to observe the Pleiades and the Hyades star clusters. We used the telescopes to observe different types of stars and Jupiter, which was incredibly bright in the night sky.

Pulsars and Neutron Stars

A neutron star is an imploded core of a massive star that occurs from a supernova. It is one of the ways of a high mass star to end its stellar evolution cycle. The typical mass of a neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. Neutron stars occur once a star uses up all of its fuel and sheds its outer layer and then collapses on itself. A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radiation that sweeps through Earth's line of sight. The pulses of high energy that we can see from Earth comes from the misalignment of the neutron star's rotation and magnetic axis.

Vela Pulsar

Neutron Star

APOD 3.8

7 March 2014

 

This is Venus and the Milky Way rising in the early morning hours of March 1st. This picture was taken on the skyline of the beach at Sea Isle City, New Jersey. Venus lies just beyond the inner boundary of the habitable zone. Earth orbits well within the habitable zone of the solar system. The watery reflection of light from Venus is seen along the beach. This is a nice, serene photo that is just very peaceful about Venus rising in the morning.

James H. Jeans Biography

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, born on September 11th 1877 and died on September 16th 1946, was an English physicist and mathematician who was the first person to propose that matter is continually formulated throughout the universe. He studied at many grammar schools throughout his childhood and Trinity College in Cambridge. He was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College in 1901 and taught at Cambridge. He moved on to teach at Princeton University in 1904 as a professor of applied mathematics but returned to Cambridge in 1910. He provided many positive contributions to physics and astronomy such as quantum theory, stellar evolution, and the theory of radiation. Sir Jeans proposed the idea that the planets condensed from material drawn out of the Sun by a hypothetical near-collision with a passing star; this idea is not accepted in the modern world. Jeans is one of the founders of cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. Much of his work included investigations of star systems, dwarf stars, sources of stellar energy and the deconstruction of rapidly spinning bodies. He published many scientific works that launched his scientific reputation such as The Dynamical Theory of Gases (1904), Theoretical Mechanics (1906), and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (1908). One of his major discoveries is the Jeans length, which is a critical radius of an interstellar cloud in space. He created an alternate to the equation called the Jeans instability which solves for the critical mass a cloud must attain before collapsing. Another law that he helped in creating is the Rayleigh--Jeans Law, which relates the energy density of blackbody radiation the an emission source's temperature. Jeans garnered multiple awards for his scientific achievements such as the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1919 and being a Member of the Order of Merit in 1939. Sir James Hopwood Jeans has had a lasting impact on the scientific realm with his publications in physics, astronomy, and applied mathematics.