Constellation
A constellation is a group of stars that forms an imaginary outline or pattern on the celestial sphere representing an animal, mythological person or creature, a god, or an inanimate object. The origins of the earliest constellations go back to prehistory. People used them to relate stories of their beliefs, creation, or mythology. Different cultures and countries adopted their own constellations, some of which lasted into the early 20th century before today's constellations were internationally recognized. Adoption of constellations has changed over time. Many have changed in shape; some became popular. Others were limited to single nations; the 48 traditional Western constellations are Greek. They are given in Aratus' work Phenomena and Ptolemy's Almagest, though their origin predates these works by several centuries. Constellations in the far southern sky were added from the 15th century until the mid-18th century when European explorers began traveling to the Southern Hemisphere. Twelve ancient constellations belong to the zodiac.
The origins of the zodiac remain uncertain. In 1928, the International Astronomical Union formally accepted 88 modern constellations, with contiguous boundaries that together cover the entire celestial sphere. Any given point in a celestial coordinate system lies in one of the modern constellations; some astronomical naming systems include the constellation where a given celestial object is found to convey its approximate location in the sky. The Flamsteed designation of a star, for example, consists of a number and the genitive form of the constellation name. Other star patterns or groups called asterisms are not constellations per se but are used by observers to navigate the night sky. Examples of bright asterisms include the Pleiades and Hyades within the constellation Taurus or Venus' Mirror in the constellation of Orion.. Some asterisms, like the False Cross, are split between two constellations; the word "constellation" comes from the Late Latin term cōnstellātiō, which can be translated as "set of stars".
The Ancient Greek word for constellation is ἄστρον. A more modern astronomical sense of the term "constellation" is as a recognisable pattern of stars whose appearance is associated with mythological characters or creatures, or earthbound animals, or objects, it can specifically denote the recognized 88 named constellations used today. Colloquial usage does not draw a sharp distinction between "constellations" and smaller "asterisms", yet the modern accepted astronomical constellations employ such a distinction. E.g. the Pleiades and the Hyades are both asterisms, each lies within the boundaries of the constellation of Taurus. Another example is the northern asterism known as the Big Dipper or the Plough, composed of the seven brightest stars within the area of the IAU-defined constellation of Ursa Major; the southern False Cross asterism includes portions of the constellations Carina and Vela and the Summer Triangle.. A constellation, viewed from a particular latitude on Earth, that never sets below the horizon is termed circumpolar.
From the North Pole or South Pole, all constellations south or north of the celestial equator are circumpolar. Depending on the definition, equatorial constellations may include those that lie between declinations 45° north and 45° south, or those that pass through the declination range of the ecliptic or zodiac ranging between 23½° north, the celestial equator, 23½° south. Although stars in constellations appear near each other in the sky, they lie at a variety of distances away from the Earth. Since stars have their own independent motions, all constellations will change over time. After tens to hundreds of thousands of years, familiar outlines will become unrecognizable. Astronomers can predict the past or future constellation outlines by measuring individual stars' common proper motions or cpm by accurate astrometry and their radial velocities by astronomical spectroscopy; the earliest evidence for the humankind's identification of constellations comes from Mesopotamian inscribed stones and clay writing tablets that date back to 3000 BC.
It seems that the bulk of the Mesopotamian constellations were created within a short interval from around 1300 to 1000 BC. Mesopotamian constellations appeared in many of the classical Greek constellations; the oldest Babylonian star catalogues of stars and constellations date back to the beginning in the Middle Bronze Age, most notably the Three Stars Each texts and the MUL. APIN, an expanded and revised version based on more accurate observation from around 1000 BC. However, the numerous Sumerian names in these catalogues suggest that they built on older, but otherwise unattested, Sumerian traditions of the Early Bronze Age; the classical Zodiac is a revision of Neo-Babylonian constellations from the 6th century BC. The Greeks adopted the Babylonian constellations in the 4th century BC. Twenty Ptolemaic constellations are from the Ancient Near East. Another ten have the same stars but different names. Biblical scholar, E. W. Bullinger interpreted some of the creatures mentioned in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation as the middle signs of the four quarters of the Zodiac, with the Lion as Leo, the Bull as Taurus, the Man representing Aquarius and the Eagle standing in for Scorpio.
The biblical Book of Job also
Metallicity
In astronomy, metallicity is used to describe the abundance of elements present in an object that are heavier than hydrogen or helium. Most of the physical matter in the Universe is in the form of hydrogen and helium, so astronomers use the word "metals" as a convenient short term for "all elements except hydrogen and helium"; this usage is distinct from the usual physical definition of a solid metal. For example and nebulae with high abundances of carbon, nitrogen and neon are called "metal-rich" in astrophysical terms though those elements are non-metals in chemistry; the presence of heavier elements hails from stellar nucleosynthesis, the theory that the majority of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the Universe are formed in the cores of stars as they evolve. Over time, stellar winds and supernovae deposit the metals into the surrounding environment, enriching the interstellar medium and providing recycling materials for the birth of new stars, it follows that older generations of stars, which formed in the metal-poor early Universe have lower metallicities than those of younger generations, which formed in a more metal-rich Universe.
Observed changes in the chemical abundances of different types of stars, based on the spectral peculiarities that were attributed to metallicity, led astronomer Walter Baade in 1944 to propose the existence of two different populations of stars. These became known as Population I and Population II stars. A third stellar population was introduced in 1978, known as Population III stars; these metal-poor stars were theorised to have been the "first-born" stars created in the Universe. Astronomers use several different methods to describe and approximate metal abundances, depending on the available tools and the object of interest; some methods include determining the fraction of mass, attributed to gas versus metals, or measuring the ratios of the number of atoms of two different elements as compared to the ratios found in the Sun. Stellar composition is simply defined by the parameters X, Y and Z. Here X is the mass fraction of hydrogen, Y is the mass fraction of helium, Z is the mass fraction of all the remaining chemical elements.
Thus X + Y + Z = 1.00. In most stars, nebulae, H II regions, other astronomical sources and helium are the two dominant elements; the hydrogen mass fraction is expressed as X ≡ m H / M, where M is the total mass of the system, m H is the fractional mass of the hydrogen it contains. The helium mass fraction is denoted as Y ≡ m He / M; the remainder of the elements are collectively referred to as "metals", the metallicity—the mass fraction of elements heavier than helium—can be calculated as Z = ∑ i > He m i M = 1 − X − Y. For the surface of the Sun, these parameters are measured to have the following values: Due to the effects of stellar evolution, neither the initial composition nor the present day bulk composition of the Sun is the same as its present-day surface composition; the overall stellar metallicity is defined using the total iron content of the star, as iron is among the easiest to measure with spectral observations in the visible spectrum. The abundance ratio is defined as the logarithm of the ratio of a star's iron abundance compared to that of the Sun and is expressed thus: = log 10 star − log 10 sun, where N Fe and N H are the number of iron and hydrogen atoms per unit of volume respectively.
The unit used for metallicity is the dex, contraction of "decimal exponent". By this formulation, stars with a higher metallicity than the Sun have a positive logarithmic value, whereas those with a lower metallicity than the Sun have a negative value. For example, stars with a value of +1 have 10 times the metallicity of the Sun. Young Population I stars have higher iron-to-hydrogen ratios than older Population II stars. Primordial Population III stars are estimated to have a metallicity of less than −6.0, that is, less than a millionth of the abundance of iron in the Sun. The same notation is used to express variations in abundances between other the individual elements as compared to solar proportions. For example, the notati
Minute and second of arc
A minute of arc, arc minute, or minute arc is a unit of angular measurement equal to 1/60 of one degree. Since one degree is 1/360 of a turn, one minute of arc is 1/21600 of a turn – it is for this reason that the Earth's circumference is exactly 21,600 nautical miles. A minute of arc is π/10800 of a radian. A second of arc, arcsecond, or arc second is 1/60 of an arcminute, 1/3600 of a degree, 1/1296000 of a turn, π/648000 of a radian; these units originated in Babylonian astronomy as sexagesimal subdivisions of the degree. To express smaller angles, standard SI prefixes can be employed; the number of square arcminutes in a complete sphere is 4 π 2 = 466 560 000 π ≈ 148510660 square arcminutes. The names "minute" and "second" have nothing to do with the identically named units of time "minute" or "second"; the identical names reflect the ancient Babylonian number system, based on the number 60. The standard symbol for marking the arcminute is the prime, though a single quote is used where only ASCII characters are permitted.
One arcminute is thus written 1′. It is abbreviated as arcmin or amin or, less the prime with a circumflex over it; the standard symbol for the arcsecond is the double prime, though a double quote is used where only ASCII characters are permitted. One arcsecond is thus written 1″, it is abbreviated as arcsec or asec. In celestial navigation, seconds of arc are used in calculations, the preference being for degrees and decimals of a minute, for example, written as 42° 25.32′ or 42° 25.322′. This notation has been carried over into marine GPS receivers, which display latitude and longitude in the latter format by default; the full moon's average apparent size is about 31 arcminutes. An arcminute is the resolution of the human eye. An arcsecond is the angle subtended by a U. S. dime coin at a distance of 4 kilometres. An arcsecond is the angle subtended by an object of diameter 725.27 km at a distance of one astronomical unit, an object of diameter 45866916 km at one light-year, an object of diameter one astronomical unit at a distance of one parsec, by definition.
A milliarcsecond is about the size of a dime atop the Eiffel Tower. A microarcsecond is about the size of a period at the end of a sentence in the Apollo mission manuals left on the Moon as seen from Earth. A nanoarcsecond is about the size of a penny on Neptune's moon Triton as observed from Earth. Notable examples of size in arcseconds are: Hubble Space Telescope has calculational resolution of 0.05 arcseconds and actual resolution of 0.1 arcseconds, close to the diffraction limit. Crescent Venus measures between 66 seconds of arc. Since antiquity the arcminute and arcsecond have been used in astronomy. In the ecliptic coordinate system and longitude; the principal exception is right ascension in equatorial coordinates, measured in time units of hours and seconds. The arcsecond is often used to describe small astronomical angles such as the angular diameters of planets, the proper motion of stars, the separation of components of binary star systems, parallax, the small change of position of a star in the course of a year or of a solar system body as the Earth rotates.
These small angles may be written in milliarcseconds, or thousandths of an arcsecond. The unit of distance, the parsec, named from the parallax of one arc second, was developed for such parallax measurements, it is the distance at which the mean radius of the Earth's orbit would subtend an angle of one arcsecond. The ESA astrometric space probe Gaia, launched in 2013, can approximate star positions to 7 microarcseconds. Apart from the Sun, the star with the largest angular diameter from Earth is R Doradus, a red giant with a diameter of 0.05 arcsecond. Because of the effects of atmospheric seeing, ground-based telescopes will smear the image of a star to an angular diameter of about 0.5 arcsecond. The dwarf planet Pluto has proven difficult to resolve because its angular diameter is about 0.1 arcsecond. Space telescopes are diffraction limited. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope can reach an angular size of stars down to about 0.1″. Techniques exist for improving seeing on the ground. Adaptive optics, for example, can produce images around 0.05 arcsecond on a 10 m class telescope.
Minutes and seconds of arc are used in cartography and navigation. At sea level one minute of arc
ArXiv
ArXiv is a repository of electronic preprints approved for posting after moderation, but not full peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014. By October 2016 the submission rate had grown to more than 10,000 per month. ArXiv was made possible by the compact TeX file format, which allowed scientific papers to be transmitted over the Internet and rendered client-side. Around 1990, Joanne Cohn began emailing physics preprints to colleagues as TeX files, but the number of papers being sent soon filled mailboxes to capacity. Paul Ginsparg recognized the need for central storage, in August 1991 he created a central repository mailbox stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory which could be accessed from any computer.
Additional modes of access were soon added: FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992, the World Wide Web in 1993. The term e-print was adopted to describe the articles, it began as a physics archive, called the LANL preprint archive, but soon expanded to include astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology and, most statistics. Its original domain name was xxx.lanl.gov. Due to LANL's lack of interest in the expanding technology, in 2001 Ginsparg changed institutions to Cornell University and changed the name of the repository to arXiv.org. It is now hosted principally with eight mirrors around the world, its existence was one of the precipitating factors that led to the current movement in scientific publishing known as open access. Mathematicians and scientists upload their papers to arXiv.org for worldwide access and sometimes for reviews before they are published in peer-reviewed journals. Ginsparg was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 for his establishment of arXiv; the annual budget for arXiv is $826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation and annual fee income from member institutions.
This model arose in 2010, when Cornell sought to broaden the financial funding of the project by asking institutions to make annual voluntary contributions based on the amount of download usage by each institution. Each member institution pledges a five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,000 to $4,400. Cornell's goal is to raise at least $504,000 per year through membership fees generated by 220 institutions. In September 2011, Cornell University Library took overall administrative and financial responsibility for arXiv's operation and development. Ginsparg was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying it "was supposed to be a three-hour tour, not a life sentence". However, Ginsparg remains on the arXiv Scientific Advisory Board and on the arXiv Physics Advisory Committee. Although arXiv is not peer reviewed, a collection of moderators for each area review the submissions; the lists of moderators for many sections of arXiv are publicly available, but moderators for most of the physics sections remain unlisted.
Additionally, an "endorsement" system was introduced in 2004 as part of an effort to ensure content is relevant and of interest to current research in the specified disciplines. Under the system, for categories that use it, an author must be endorsed by an established arXiv author before being allowed to submit papers to those categories. Endorsers are not asked to review the paper for errors, but to check whether the paper is appropriate for the intended subject area. New authors from recognized academic institutions receive automatic endorsement, which in practice means that they do not need to deal with the endorsement system at all. However, the endorsement system has attracted criticism for restricting scientific inquiry. A majority of the e-prints are submitted to journals for publication, but some work, including some influential papers, remain purely as e-prints and are never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A well-known example of the latter is an outline of a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture, including the Poincaré conjecture as a particular case, uploaded by Grigori Perelman in November 2002.
Perelman appears content to forgo the traditional peer-reviewed journal process, stating: "If anybody is interested in my way of solving the problem, it's all there – let them go and read about it". Despite this non-traditional method of publication, other mathematicians recognized this work by offering the Fields Medal and Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes to Perelman, both of which he refused. Papers can be submitted in any of several formats, including LaTeX, PDF printed from a word processor other than TeX or LaTeX; the submission is rejected by the arXiv software if generating the final PDF file fails, if any image file is too large, or if the total size of the submission is too large. ArXiv now allows one to store and modify an incomplete submission, only finalize the submission when ready; the time stamp on the article is set. The standard access route is through one of several mirrors. Sev
Red dwarf
A red dwarf is a small and cool star on the main sequence, of M spectral type. Red dwarfs range in mass from about 0.075 to about 0.50 solar mass and have a surface temperature of less than 4,000 K. Sometimes K-type main-sequence stars, with masses between 0.50-0.8 solar mass, are included. Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun, but because of their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot be observed. From Earth, not one is visible to the naked eye. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is a red dwarf, as are fifty of the sixty nearest stars. According to some estimates, red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way. Stellar models indicate that red dwarfs less than 0.35 M☉ are convective. Hence the helium produced by the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen is remixed throughout the star, avoiding helium buildup at the core, thereby prolonging the period of fusion. Red dwarfs therefore develop slowly, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years, until their fuel is depleted.
Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of evolution. The term "red dwarf" when used to refer to a star does not have a strict definition. One of the earliest uses of the term was in 1915, used to contrast "red" dwarf stars from hotter "blue" dwarf stars, it became established use. In terms of which spectral types qualify as red dwarfs, different researchers picked different limits, for example K8–M5 or "later than K5". Dwarf M star, abbreviated dM, was used, but sometimes it included stars of spectral type K. In modern usage, the definition of a red dwarf still varies; when explicitly defined, it includes late K- and early to mid-M-class stars, but in many cases it is restricted just to M-class stars. In some cases all K stars are included as red dwarfs, even earlier stars; the coolest true main-sequence stars are thought to have spectral types around L2 or L3, but many objects cooler than about M6 or M7 are brown dwarfs, insufficiently massive to sustain hydrogen-1 fusion.
Red dwarfs are very-low-mass stars. As a result, they have low pressures, a low fusion rate, hence, a low temperature; the energy generated is the product of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium by way of the proton–proton chain mechanism. Hence, these stars emit little light, sometimes as little as 1⁄10,000 that of the Sun; the largest red dwarfs have only about 10% of the Sun's luminosity. In general, red dwarfs less than 0.35 M☉ transport energy from the core to the surface by convection. Convection occurs because of opacity of the interior, which has a high density compared to the temperature; as a result, energy transfer by radiation is decreased, instead convection is the main form of energy transport to the surface of the star. Above this mass, a red dwarf will have a region around its core; because low-mass red dwarfs are convective, helium does not accumulate at the core, compared to larger stars such as the Sun, they can burn a larger proportion of their hydrogen before leaving the main sequence.
As a result, red dwarfs have estimated lifespans far longer than the present age of the universe, stars less than 0.8 M☉ have not had time to leave the main sequence. The lower the mass of a red dwarf, the longer the lifespan, it is believed that the lifespan of these stars exceeds the expected 10-billion-year lifespan of our Sun by the third or fourth power of the ratio of the solar mass to their masses. As the proportion of hydrogen in a red dwarf is consumed, the rate of fusion declines and the core starts to contract; the gravitational energy released by this size reduction is converted into heat, carried throughout the star by convection. According to computer simulations, the minimum mass a red dwarf must have in order to evolve into a red giant is 0.25 M☉. The less massive the star, the longer this evolutionary process takes, it has been calculated that a 0.16 M☉ red dwarf would stay on the main sequence for 2.5 trillion years, followed by five billion years as a blue dwarf, during which the star would have one third of the Sun's luminosity and a surface temperature of 6,500–8,500 kelvins.
The fact that red dwarfs and other low-mass stars still remain on the main sequence when more massive stars have moved off the main sequence allows the age of star clusters to be estimated by finding the mass at which the stars move off the main sequence. This provides a lower limit to the age of the Universe and allows formation timescales to be placed upon the structures within the Milky Way, such as the Galactic halo and Galactic disk. All observed red dwarfs contain "metals", which in astronomy are elements heavier than hydrogen and helium; the Big Bang model predicts that the first generation of stars should have only hydrogen and trace amounts of lithium, hence would be of low metallicity. With their extreme lifespans, any red dwarfs that were a part of that first generation should still exist today. Low metallicity red dwarfs, are rare. There are several explanations for the missing population of metal-poor red dwarfs; the preferred explanation is. Large stars burn out and exp
Mass
Mass is both a property of a physical body and a measure of its resistance to acceleration when a net force is applied. The object's mass determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies; the basic SI unit of mass is the kilogram. In physics, mass is not the same as weight though mass is determined by measuring the object's weight using a spring scale, rather than balance scale comparing it directly with known masses. An object on the Moon would weigh less than it does on Earth because of the lower gravity, but it would still have the same mass; this is because weight is a force, while mass is the property that determines the strength of this force. There are several distinct phenomena. Although some theorists have speculated that some of these phenomena could be independent of each other, current experiments have found no difference in results regardless of how it is measured: Inertial mass measures an object's resistance to being accelerated by a force. Active gravitational mass measures the gravitational force exerted by an object.
Passive gravitational mass measures the gravitational force exerted on an object in a known gravitational field. The mass of an object determines its acceleration in the presence of an applied force; the inertia and the inertial mass describe the same properties of physical bodies at the qualitative and quantitative level by other words, the mass quantitatively describes the inertia. According to Newton's second law of motion, if a body of fixed mass m is subjected to a single force F, its acceleration a is given by F/m. A body's mass determines the degree to which it generates or is affected by a gravitational field. If a first body of mass mA is placed at a distance r from a second body of mass mB, each body is subject to an attractive force Fg = GmAmB/r2, where G = 6.67×10−11 N kg−2 m2 is the "universal gravitational constant". This is sometimes referred to as gravitational mass. Repeated experiments since the 17th century have demonstrated that inertial and gravitational mass are identical.
The standard International System of Units unit of mass is the kilogram. The kilogram is 1000 grams, first defined in 1795 as one cubic decimeter of water at the melting point of ice. However, because precise measurement of a decimeter of water at the proper temperature and pressure was difficult, in 1889 the kilogram was redefined as the mass of the international prototype kilogram of cast iron, thus became independent of the meter and the properties of water. However, the mass of the international prototype and its identical national copies have been found to be drifting over time, it is expected that the re-definition of the kilogram and several other units will occur on May 20, 2019, following a final vote by the CGPM in November 2018. The new definition will use only invariant quantities of nature: the speed of light, the caesium hyperfine frequency, the Planck constant. Other units are accepted for use in SI: the tonne is equal to 1000 kg. the electronvolt is a unit of energy, but because of the mass–energy equivalence it can be converted to a unit of mass, is used like one.
In this context, the mass has units of eV/c2. The electronvolt and its multiples, such as the MeV, are used in particle physics; the atomic mass unit is 1/12 of the mass of a carbon-12 atom 1.66×10−27 kg. The atomic mass unit is convenient for expressing the masses of molecules. Outside the SI system, other units of mass include: the slug is an Imperial unit of mass; the pound is a unit of both mass and force, used in the United States. In scientific contexts where pound and pound need to be distinguished, SI units are used instead; the Planck mass is the maximum mass of point particles. It is used in particle physics; the solar mass is defined as the mass of the Sun. It is used in astronomy to compare large masses such as stars or galaxies; the mass of a small particle may be identified by its inverse Compton wavelength. The mass of a large star or black hole may be identified with its Schwarzschild radius. In physical science, one may distinguish conceptually between at least seven different aspects of mass, or seven physical notions that involve the concept of mass.
Every experiment to date has shown these seven values to be proportional, in some cases equal, this proportionality gives rise to the abstract concept of mass. There are a number of ways mass can be measured or operationally defined: Inertial mass is a measure of an object's resistance to acceleration when a force is applied, it is determined by applying a force to an object and measuring the acceleration that results from that force. An object with small inertial mass will accelerate more than an object with large inertial mass when acted upon by the same force. One says. Active gravitational mass is a measure of the strength of an object's gravitational flux. Gravitational field can be measured by allowing a small "test object" to fall and measuring its free-fall acceleration. For example, an object in free fall near the Moon is subject to a smaller gravitational field, hence
Jupiter radius
Jupiter radius or Jovian radius is the distance equal to the radius of planet Jupiter. It has a value of 11.2 Earth radii. Jupiter radius is a unit of length used in astronomy to describe the radii of gas giants and some extrasolar planets, it is used in describing brown dwarfs. In 2015, the International Astronomical Union defined the nominal equatorial Jovian radius to remain constant regardless of subsequent improvements in measurement precision of RJ; this constant is defined as exactly: R e J N = 7.1492×107 mSimilarly, the nominal polar Jovian radius is defined to be exactly: R p J N = 6.6854×107 mThese values correspond to the radius of Jupiter at 1 bar of pressure. The common usage is to refer to the equatorial radius, unless the polar radius is needed. For comparison, one Solar radius is equivalent to: 400 Lunar radius 109 Earth radius 9.735 Jupiter radius
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06h 30m 32.794s, +29° 40′ 20.29″
