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...