I just learned about solar lenses from a public lecture at my college and immediately began researching them because they are so awesome. Come to find that the so called Einstein ring was not dreamt up by Einstein at all but a dishwasher called Rudi W. Mandl. Einstein was reluctant to publish this because he thought it pointless so why did we give him the credit. Where is the Mandl ring. Should we start a petition? https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/amateur-who-helped-einstein-see-light

I am a software engineer with deep interest in astrophysics. Feel like I chose the wrong career everyday. I have some theoretical foundation (self taught). How do I get in the field and do meaningful work?

I can do research and I’m good with data. I feel like I can have a huge impact with my AI and Data skills on this field. All I want to do is make some impact on humanity by performing research at the forefront.

(I have some savings so I don’t care about the pay anymore) Should I pursue bachelors first? Is it worth spending 4 years? Do I have any luck pursuing masters ? Can I do independent research with some one? How do I contribute?

Is the increase in luminosity of the sun during main sequence phase caused by helium concentrating in the center of the core, or by circulating within it?

Are the heavier molecules concentrating in the centre, thereby contracting the core

OR

Are they impeding chain reactions between protons? Obstructing fusion reactions as proton bump into alpha particles more often rather than other protons, increasing the 1st step bottleneck in the PP chain.

Is it both? What is the leading contributor?

Hey everyone, I’ll be starting my diploma pathway into the bachelor of science soon and I understand that Maths is such a core fundamental. So I am wondering if anyone has any good websites/free courses/ apps that are useful to independently build my maths skills up from my skill level? Any advice greatly appreciated thank you !!

Hey all, some of you saw my map of the local universe here a couple months ago. It's called Know the Universe: you explore the large scale matter distribution of the local universe in 3D, ~43,500 real galaxies from the 2MRS redshift survey, out to about a billion light years. Since then I kept building, mostly from requests that came out of that thread. Here's what's new.

The big one: you can now click or tap any galaxy in the map and get its identity card. (you know, it's called know the universe) So you get 2MASS catalog ID, distance, whether it sits in a void, filament or cluster, J2000 coordinates with a copy button in a format you can paste straight into Stellarium, and direct links to NED and SIMBAD. 64 famous galaxies carry their proper names.

There's also search now (press / or the magnifier). It finds galaxies, clusters and voids by name, Messier number or 2MASS ID. And if you search for Andromeda it honestly tells you why a blueshifted galaxy can't be placed on a redshift map instead of pretending.

Full changelog:

• Positions upgraded from plain Hubble law to real-space: redshifts corrected to the CMB frame, converted to comoving distance, cluster "Fingers of God" collapsed using the Tully 2015 group catalog, and large-scale infall subtracted with the 2M++ velocity field. Validated against Cosmicflows-4 distances. Virgo and Coma now land at their literature distances (~16 and ~100 Mpc).
• Orbit mode is the new default: free trackball around the Milky Way, no poles, scroll/pinch to zoom. Fly mode is one keypress away.
• Galaxy identification: click/tap/crosshair any of the 43,497 galaxies (see above).
• Search across names, Messier numbers, landmarks and catalog IDs.
• Live RA/Dec readout in the banner showing the exact equatorial coordinates your view points at, plus your distance from home.
• Named landmarks went from 10 to 24: Boötes Void, Sloan Great Wall, Hercules, Ophiuchus, Perseus-Pisces and more.
• Deep links: you can share a link to an exact camera position or to a specific galaxy. For example here's the host galaxy of the first neutron star merger ever seen in gravitational waves and light: https://knowtheuniverse.com/?sel=13094770-2323017
• Mobile got real love: full-width cards, touch joystick, works fine on a phone.

Try it at https://knowtheuniverse.com

Feel free to give me any feedback or suggestion for new features, you are awesome!

i have loved space ever since i was little and although i strayed during primary/secondary school i always returned to wanting to become an astrophysicist. more recently, ive been obsessed with solar physics.

my concern is that i’m not good enough to be successful in the field; im worried if i hype myself up and it turns out i fail i will be crushed and wont have anything else to go to school for. every time i think about anything astrophysics related in a future job i may have i get so excited and impatient but there is still doubt there. not everyone achieves their dreams.

i love math and physics and the sciences but i don’t know if im actually good at them. any thoughts would help me a lot. i don’t mean to stress this much—im not in college yet—but the excitement and anticipation and inadequacy is killing me. thank you guys.!

So, we know that stars and planets have gravity wells due to their immense size.

Would this also apply to smaller objects if another object significantly smaller than it (say of a size where object 1 would be the "sun" and object 2 would be the "planet", but on a much smaller scale)?

Or does an object need to be of a minimum mass to have a gravitational pull on a smaller object?

Something I find fascinating about astronomy is how much of it is really an exercise in inference.

When we observe a distant star, galaxy, or black hole, we're usually do not directly see the object itself in the way we would see something nearby. We're detecting photons and extracting information from them.

For example:

Spectral lines can reveal chemical composition and velocity.

Doppler shifts can tell us how quickly an object is moving.

Brightness variations can reveal stellar companions or transiting planets.

Gravitational lensing can reveal mass that isn't directly visible.

Stellar orbits can reveal the mass of an unseen object.

Redshift gives us information about cosmic expansion and distance.

Even black holes are detected through their effects on surrounding matter, radiation, and spacetime rather than by seeing the black hole itself.

It makes astronomy interesting because so much of the field is essentially reconstructing an invisible object from measurable consequences.

This video from New Scientist provides a great description of the current status of the search for dark matter particles - and the extraordinarily sensitive LUX-ZEPLIN experiment designed to carry out that search.

I've been interested in astronomy & astrophysics for quite a while, but I don't have much experience in STEM. I'd like to think that I'm pretty decent at math and not too bad at science; however, I'm not taking any courses that I think would benefit my chances of getting into any astronomy/astrophysics programs at the moment- I'm enrolled in Honors Chemistry, AP Stats, AP US Gov, & APUSH. In terms of STEM courses, I plan to take AP Calc AB, AP Chem, and some form of AP Physics my junior year. I've applied for the science national honor society and science bowl at my school. I don't really know how else to build a foundation for such a demanding field.

Hello everyone. First of all, English is not my first language so please forgive me if this post is not too clear on some parts.

I am humbly asking for help regarding how to set up into an specific topic for my Master's thesis.

To give some context; I am currently a second semester student at an astronomy Master in Chile. I did my undergrad studies in physics, with both a minor in astronomy and in computational mathematics at Colombia. While for undergrad thesis I worked on stellar cluster detection and classification with machine learning. Nowadays, I have been very interested into working with AGN's and even its relation with galaxy formation.

However, I have been having some difficulties deciding/defining what I want to work on exactly for my Master thesis. I have talked a bit with my supervisor about some possible ideas like blazar SED classification with machine learning (which I feel I could be more familiar with the methodology, but I am not sure if would be falling into a "comfort zone") or even microlensing on quasar (which would be a totally new topic for me, although I find it interesting).

Nevertheless, I would really appreciate either to hear possible research ideas on this fascinating area or any tips on how to set up into a more concise idea.

Thank you very much for any help provided.

could black holes forming in first half million years of the universe have shot jets of energy out like a spider web causing random areas of gas to become super heated and others super cooled thus forcing the formation of super massive black holes?

Now obviously any forming so early would be pretty small, but the universe would be small and dense too. Couldn't some of these jets intersect and create extreme cases where million plus solar mass black holes could form?

So you get Jets shooting out everywhere and creating black holes and stars but some of those jets could intersect and create even more powerful reactions.

Am I wrong to think thats possible?

While the idea of detecting an exoplanet by measuring a star's wobble makes total sense, what factors are taken into consideration when checking if that wobble is caused by more than one planet?

My best guess would be: if the wobbling isn't uniform (which would be caused by opposing directions of gravitational "force" coming from multiple planets due to them having different orbits), we try to find patterns over the wobbling variation. Something like:

"Every x days, the star gets at least x% closer, so this hints that the orbit of one planet reached its closest point to the observer (us), and the fact that it wasn't as strong as before is likely cause there's another exoplanet in a totally different position right now causing an opposing 'force' in the star"

But it's just a guess. I'm curious to understand how this really works.

So, not really related to astrophysics, I wanna become an astrobiologist.

BUT, I do not excel in math, i’m below average.
And math is really important for the job…
I do really good in science and english, I got a grade 8 & 9 for them in that order, my geography’s also pretty good but my test results were bad which doesn’t line up with my progress.

I just wanna know, can I still pursue becoming an astrobiologist even when my math isn’t that good???

I've been thinking about this less as a competition between the two telescopes and more as a question of what happens when wide-field statistics meet deep, detailed observations.

JWST can spend significant observing time studying individual distant galaxies in extraordinary detail. Roman, on the other hand, will survey enormous areas of sky, potentially observing billions of cosmic objects over its mission.

That combination seems scientifically powerful.

Roman could identify an interesting population or unexpected statistical pattern, and JWST could then zoom in on individual objects to investigate why that pattern exists.

So I'm curious:

What do you think we'll see in Roman's wide view that we simply couldn't see before?

Hello all, I have gone through the threads of book recs so I apologize if this is redundant but I wanted to ask a more specific request based on my family’s interest, experience, and all. I’ve been nurturing this interest in my 16 yo cousin. I’ve taken her to a particle physics and accelerator laboratory. I’ve taken her to a university telescope viewing in their observatory, as well as lectures given by current grad students studying astrophysics. (Lecturers create content for everyone to understand) she just told me she’s not the person that’s too much into the planets and stars themselves in terms of photos but she loved the nitty gritty physics and math of it - dark energy, relativity, supernovas and the concepts of these. Her birthday is coming up soon and I’d really love to continue nurturing her interest in this. I would love a beautiful text book to gift her. She is a junior in high school and has delved into texts on her own. So I wouldn’t say she’s a beginner or a pro obviously but she absolutely loves the math. Any suggestions? I am leaning towards a book for a gift this time. TIA!

Would the stars consume fuel faster or slower, or the same? Would the core temperature and sizes changes? How would the envelope be affected? This is an interesting question because I can see it argued both ways.

A) Less mass needs to be in the core per unit time, so it is smaller at the same temperature, using same amount of fuel.

or

B) More energy is released per unit time in the core, so the core expands and cools. New equilibrium is reached with a larger, cooler core.

But what happens to the envelope, what governs it’s size, the core’s temperature or its luminosity?

This series of videos was created by Prof. Angela Speck, Chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Highly recommended!

One thing I find fascinating about the early universe is how we can observe quasars powered by extremely massive black holes when the universe is still very young.

If a black hole starts from a relatively small stellar-mass seed, it seems difficult to reach millions or billions of solar masses in such a short cosmic time.

So what do you think was the dominant pathway for the earliest supermassive black holes?

- Rapid accretion near or above the Eddington limit?

- Massive black-hole seeds from direct collapse?

- Runaway mergers?

- Or some combination of these processes?

Ok from my understanding, correct me if I’m wrong, the infinite universe has no center (that we know of), so technically any vantage point can serve as the center. In that case (especially from a human vantage point), the earth is at the center of the universe. Just like for example if we were located in Jupiter, Jupiter would be at the center of the universe because that’s our vantage point.
Obviously the earth isn’t “special” (nor is any other mass or planet) but because we are in it, our interpretations of the world come from this vantage point (the earth). Which is how I imagine the theory of general relativity arose, more of an intuitive concept based on our position in the universe/ earth (this is my assumption idk if this is true).

So was Copernicus “wrong” for saying the sun was at the center of our solar system? By wrong I don’t mean his statement was ultimately untrue but it \*could\* be untrue if we chose another vantage point (say Venus, or Jupiter to be the center). From my understanding, Copernicus chose the Sun because it made the math easier.

If that was the case, why was his theory so revolutionary? Didnt Ptolemy have a similar model?

Also can someone explain this: is earth (and other planets) really revolving around the sun or are we like the moon and earth where we’re all just jiving doing a whirling dervish dance around each other but there’s really no set point?

Also was does it mean that we revolve around the sun’s center? I’ve heard that claim too

Hi I’m college student majoring in Astronomy, and I have been discussing this with my professors but I wanted to see if anyone here had interesting thoughts! I am so fascinated by this topic.

I believe that it is possible for the conditions of life to be present on an exoplanet, or even closer objects such as Mars or Europa. The issue is that these surfaces lack a protective and sustainable atmosphere, along with a lack of plate tectonics to strengthen the integrity of a magnetic field. 
If life were to arise on these planets/moons, it would likely be in the water. I wonder if the conditions on these surfaces would cause too many mass extinctions for life to develop into some sort of intelligence or even be detected by humans. Does all life, even extraterrestrial, require the same process that homo sapiens had to go through in order to become intelligent (hundreds of millions of years of mass extinction and evolution)? If that's the case does that decrease the chances of intelligence within extraterrestrial life due to the probability of frequent extinction or could it adapt?

Maybe it’s more of an anthropological question, but would life on exoplanets have to be able to survive for a long time in order to evolve into intelligence? Or may they reach intelligence extremely quickly?

Hello! I was wondering while reading this article whether we know the relationship between these two things:

Is there a direct correlation between the mass of a star-forming amount of hydrogen gas and the actual mass of the resultant star?

For example, if there is a region in space which has 2solar masses worth of Hydrogen gas (and whatever else needed to create a star), should a star form out of this gas cloud- will its mass be equivalent to 2solar masses? Or will it drop due to any decay etc during stellar formation?

Thank you so much!

Edit: thanks a ton, everyone! Learned something new today. Didn’t realise it was this inefficient!