Rachel Talks About Astronomy

  Hi folks! Let's ignore that delay... So anyway. CHICKENS. Detection by Photometric Extinction Sounds complicated, and you know what? It is. But I'll attempt to explain it both simply and accurately. What is photometric extinction? "Photometric" is a fancy word for "light," or dealing with the unit of light called "photons." When a light source releases a lot of photons, it's bright; when it doesn't give many, it's dim. And when there's something between us and a bright source, it simply appears  dim because that stuff is in the way. Like fog between you and a street light: you know the light is (intrinsically) brighter than it appears, and that it only looks dim because of the fog. In astronomy, our light sources are stars or distant galaxies, and the "fog" is gas and dust (and chickens??) between the source and the Earth - this is called the interstellar medium , or ISM. Dimming the light is known as extinction . How ma...

 Hi folks! It's been a while! I've been busy, and during my procrastination I was busy putting together an April Fool's Day paper called Nuggets of Wisdom: Determining an Upper Limit on the Number Density of Chickens in the Universe . My collaborator, Dr. Zachary Claytor, and I applied various complex astrophysical regimes to answer the question How many chickens could there be in space before we notice them? In this series of posts, I want to break down and explain the science and math that went into the sections of this paper for a general audience. I'm really proud of this work, not just as an astronomer but as a budding science communicator. While the average Joe can appreciate the puns and jokes throughout the paper, I want to take some time to explain everything in between. What is a density function? A density function is a term astronomers (and probably other scientists) use to describe how many things or how much stuff there is based on some other metric. In th...

"Hey, younger brother, do you know what sunspots are?" "Like, spots on the Sun?" "Yeah" "Not really" "Tell me everything you know about them." "They're, um, little dark spots that appear on the Sun. I don't know if it's part of the surface of the star or if it's our perspective from Earth looking at the star and there's stuff in the way. It could be stuff just floating nearby." This post is to explain to my brother, a substitute teacher, what sunspots are. Little Dark Spots Sunspots are, in fact, on the surface of the Sun and other stars. Stuff (planets, meteors, dust, etc) floating in front of the Sun is a really good guess, though, and certainly happens a lot. The way we know it's not  stuff between us and the Sun is that we see the spots rotate around the Sun. The material at the equator of the Sun makes one rotation every 25 Earth days, so if a sunspot is at the equator, we see it move across the su...

 The other day my friend told me they heard a fun fact, but want more clarity. Specifically they asked, Why is iron the "most stable" element? This is one of those cases where there's a very straightforward answer, but it's not simple; the simple answer, though, is not straightforward. But this blog is all about making answers simple, so here we go! Where does iron come from? A little while after the Universe started, it was full of hydrogen and helium at a ratio of about 3:1. Technically some berillium (element number three) was probably in the mix but astronomers don't count that much. So where did all of the other elements come from? Well, for all of the elements that are lighter than iron, they were created in stars via nuclear fusion. This sentence already tells you that iron is a key element in this process, but let's take a second to go over nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion review Stars like our Sun have a ton of hydrogen at their center, and enough heat ...

 Let's Lighten Things Up Hopefully you have some ideas about light. Thanks to Isaac Newton and Pink Floyd, we're familiar with the idea that white light can be split by a prism into a rainbow. Prisms can be the classic long glass triangles, and also water droplets - this is how we get a rainbow, of course. Cover art for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon  featuring white light being split by a prism. So what's happening? And why do astronomers care? Well, astronomers care about light because that's kind of all we get as far as information about the Universe. When we observe starlight or collect sunlight, we're collecting photons , which are units of light. These get kind of interesting but also technical. Getting a bit technical So, photons are units of light, and we can kind of visualize them as packets of a wave. You might've heard light described as both a wave and a particle, so the way I think of it is as a particle with wave-like properties. Specifical...

 Hello there! Welcome to this blog! What is it? Well, I have some ideas of what it could be A collection of TA-styled mini lectures about physics, astronomy, and math to help high school and undergrad students better understand their courses Deep dives into fun facts about astronomy, like what it means for the Universe to be expanding Discussion about astronomy news and current events Insights into what it means to be an astronomy, aimed at those who are considering it as a career path Meta-thoughts about science communication, the role of the scientist, the public, and the science communicator in-between General journal entries from a tired graduate student The number one thing this is: a chance for me to write. And write. And write. This will be mostly unedited, slightly unfiltered, hopefully not unhinged, and ideally understandable. I want to write here on a regular basis in order to practice putting my thoughts into words for a general audience. I want to begin entering the fie...