# All Questions

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### Magnetic fields of peculiar HgMn A type stars

Do HgMn (peculiar A type) stars really possess global magnetic fields? See, for example, this paper by Hubrig et al. from 2012.
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### Can there be an object with planetary discriminant between Ceres and Neptune?

The planetary discriminant is a measure of how dominant a body is within its region of the solar system. For (true) planets, it is >10000 and for dwarf planets it is <1. See this answer for more ...
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### Is it accurate to compare comets to clouds and rain?

I'm trying to avoid an opinion-based question, so before I outline the comparison I'm proposing, I will qualify the specific facts that yield this comparison. By focusing answers on the relative ...
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### Does CIBER Experiment from Caltech suggest that there can be lots of stars which are not in any galaxy?

My question is about the implications of the observations recently made by the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, from Caltech. I've read at Caltech web site: "The total light ...
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This article from 2011 mentions simulations about the sputtering effect caused by a solar flare hitting the Moon: "We found that when this massive cloud of plasma strikes the moon, it acts like ...
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### Equation for solar radiation at a given latitude on a given exoplanet?

I'm trying to find equations that would help me determine the amount of solar radiation hitting a certain latitude on a certain planet given the following inputs: the degrees of latitude of the ...
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### Orbits in a binary star system

I know of three sets of stable orbits in a binary star system: orbiting closely around star A, orbiting closely around star B, or orbiting distantly around both stars (and their mutual center of ...
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### What implications does younger volcanism have on the Moon's thermal evolution?

In the paper Evidence for basaltic volcanism on the Moon within the past 100 million years (Braden et al. 2014), suggest that features such as Ina (image below) represent a far more recent age of ...
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### What visual artifacts are expected from the JWST?

What visual artifacts should we expect from the images that will be released from the James Webb Space Telescope? Specifically, do we expect 3-pronged diffraction spikes (any preview how they would ...
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### How can we be 13.2 billion light years from another galaxy?

How did we get 13.2 billion light years from the faraway galaxies being discovered with Hubble? If we all started near each other at the Big Bang, and we all travelled slower than the speed of light, ...
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### How thick can planetary rings be?

This arose from a comment on Worldbuilding. We have data from four planets in the Solar System with rings, which doesn't make for a very good sample size. Observations of exoplanets could change ...
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### Why are there no stars on New Horizons images of Pluto

I followed the New Horizons Mission a little, and saw among others this image of Pluto: I wonder, why you can't see any stars on it. As far as my very basic knowledge in astronomy goes, I think you ...
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Regarding solar system dynamics, i.e. planets in stellar systems and moons in planetary systems, this is often mentioned in the literature, but it is difficult to find a good analysis/explanation of ...
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### Are trojans in L5 more likely than in L4?

Mars has much more trojans in L5. Does it reflect a common pattern?
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### How Does Black Hole Evaporation Look From the Inside?

Imagine you're inside a black hole event horizon. The curvature of spacetime is such that the direction towards the singularity becomes timelike, as reverse movement becomes literally impossible. How ...
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### How can you determine the initial volume of a planet's atmosphere?

Since the surface pressure of a planet is determined by the mass of the column of gasses above it one would surmise that to determine the pressure you must know the volume and mass of the atmosphere. ...
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### Total solar eclipse, supermoon, and spring equinox all happening at the same time: anything special about this?

Today (March 20, 2015) is seeing a rare combination of the spring equinox, a total solar eclipse, and a supermoon. I am wondering if there is anything special astronomically about all three of these ...
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### Is there a cosmic, rather than technological, upper limit to what a telescope can resolve?

Space radio interferometers could have a baseline of millions of kilometers, but is there a point where a larger baseline doesn't improve the resolution anymore because the photons observed are ...
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### Questions about a fictional binary system, and habitability

Note: Questions are at the bottom. The rest had simply been written in a format to better organize my thoughts. The formulas used to construct this fictional solar system, had been borrowed from ...
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### What is the cause of the variation from high and low mean obliquity periods of Mars?

It is reasonably well known that Mars has a greater obliquity range than Earth, due to Mars lacking a stabilising influence of a large moon. However, the Martian obliquity seems to have gone through ...
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### How to determine scalar-to-tensor ratio r from CMB polarization spectrum?

CMB polarization spectrum can tell us about the primordial scalar and tensor perturbation. By analyze B and E mode angular spectrum power spectrum and temperature power spectrum we can determine the ...
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### Mapping selenographic coordinates onto a sphere

I have a 3D rendering of the moon, which is represented as a sphere with a radius of N pixels. I also have selenographic coordinates. For example, the coordinates of the Apollo 11 landing site are ...
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### Does the radius of the Universe correspond to its total entropy?

I heard a claim that due to holographic principle, the surface area of the cosmic horizon corresponds to the universe's total entropy. As such the initial state had zero surface area and later ...
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### When do Mercury/Venus reach greatest elevation at sunset/twilight for a given location?

On what day does Mercury reach its greatest elevation (in degrees from the horizon) at sunset a given location? The obvious answer is the day of Mercury's greatest elongation from the Sun, but, ...
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### What are the biggest problems about the numerical, finite-element GR models?

As I know, for example the modelling of the collapse of a neutron star (to a black hole) wasn't done correctly until now. Why? Yes, I know, the Einstein Field Equations aren't really easy to solve. ...
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### What's the bleeding-edge model for how Population III stars are born and evolve?

I'm trying to do a brief literature review to find out what the best current models for population III stellar evolution are. I was hoping that someone with more expertise in the area could perhaps ...
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### How to calculate the heliocentric velocity of an object?

My task is to calculate the heliocentric velocity of an object to correct for wavelength in a spectrum. I have the RA, Dec and observation date, and I know that the NED velocity correction calculator ...
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### Stratospheric Balloon with an Xray camera

Some colleagues and I were planning to launch a stratospheric balloon in December. A thought occurred to me: what if we were to put some sort of xray camera in the payload? We are expecting a maximum ...
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### Universal point for sky observation

Is there a place on Earth, where polar axis lies on the horizont and heaven equator is in zenit? If it exists, can I, in theory, see all the constelations available worldwide this night?
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### The battle over Gliese 581 and Gliese 667C?

In 2014, Robertson et.al. made a case that stellar activity is masquerading as planets (here and here) for these well known systems. In both cases, they claim that the only real planets discovered so ...
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### Has New Horizon's data updated Charon's orbital elements?

For years I've been fascinated with the mutually tide-locked bodies Pluto and Charon. In July 2012, The Astronomical Journal published an article The Orbit of Charon Is Circular by Buie, Tholen and ...
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### What are the analysis steps in taking raw data from Kepler to a planetary system determination

I wish to get a concise list of the analysis steps required to take raw light data from a Kepler data set of a star through the steps needed to get to an analytical determination of the existence of a ...
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### What mechanism could have formed the Moon's Oceanus Procellarum rift-like gravity anomalies?

According to the NASA JPL web-report, Gravity Gradients Frame Oceanus Procellarum, a rift-like ring structure surrounding the Moon's Oceanus Procellarum has been detected as a gravity anomaly by the ...
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### Python 2D Jean Instability in Spiral Galaxy Simulation

I have ~1000 snapshots of a spiral galaxy simulation (from Molecular cloud perturbations t=0 to t>1Gyr. What I need to do is determine whether any position at any of the snapshot times meets criteria ...
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### Sedna, VP113 and the likelihood of the PX/Tyche/Thelistos hypotheses

Crosslisted question from http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131876/sedna-vp113-and-the-likelihood-of-the-px-tyche-thelistos-hypotheses The recent discoveries in exoplanetary science ...
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### Are there sufficient observational data to measure non-Newtonian perihelion advances of any Asteroid and Comet orbits?

Anomalous (i.e. not predicted from Newtonian theory) advances of the perihelion direction have been observed for many solar system planet orbits and have been accounted for by Einstein's General ...
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### Is Rosetta changing the theory of comets?

Rosetta is now arriving at Comet 67P. Other comets have been analyzed to some degree (Giotto, Deep Space 1, Deep Impact, etc.) So my question is... where I can study the up-to-date theory of ...
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### Estimating the tangential and cross component of the galaxy's shear using Gnomonic projection

I would like to know how I can estimate the tangential and cross component of the galaxy's shear using Gnomonic projection of the right ascension and declination ...
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### Intrasolar planetary surface temperature change divergence from Earth

Considering the vast amount of insulating gas emitted by human activity on Earth without a coincident release on all other planets in the solar system as well as the phenomenon that planets in a solar ...
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### How exactly can the hypothetical conformal invariance of the CMB spectrum be established by analyzing tensor modes?

In the introduction of this paper at the top of p11, it is mentioned that a hypothetical enhancement of the scale invariance of the CMB spectrum to conformal invariance could potentially be ...
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### Why can primordial tensor perturbations of the CMB be ascribed to gravitational waves?

Why can primordial tensor perturbations of the CMB be ascribed to gravitational waves? Is this attribution unique, or are there other michanisms that could lead to the ecitation of tensor modes? In ...
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### need data-point: actual counts per second with APD (avalanche photodiode) detector

I'm designing a sensor system to perform specialized [astronomy and space-sciences] experiments, and need a "reality check" to support or adjust my theoretical calculations. What I need is the ...
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### Luminosity Schechter function for galaxies

Just a question I am having trouble understanding. I have the Schechter luminosity function for galaxies, given as: ...
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### Moving from computerised to normal amateur telescope?

A few years ago I purchased a Celestron Nexstar 130 SLT computerised telescope thinking that it would be a perfect to get me into astronomy. The issue is the computer doesn't work at all and manually ...
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### EPIC 201367065?

I was extremely stoked when I read an article in January of this year that the Kepler2 mission found three Earth-sized objects (one possibly in the habitable zone) transiting a star only 150LY away. I ...
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### Classification of Planets?

The data from Kepler has taught us that there is a much larger number of "Neptune-class" planets out there than we previously thought. I wonder, however, if this "dominance" of Neptunes is because of ...
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### Unbelievably high masses/ densities in nasa website data

In May, I did my own amateur analysis of Kepler data that was supplied on Kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries. This was a table of all confirmed "Kepler planets" to date (April 1, 2015). This table ...
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### Planets within 10 parsecs

I have been researching what we know, so far, about planetary systems within 10 parsecs. It is easy to find out what has been found, but much harder to find out what has been eliminated (for instance: ...