27. Astrophysicist, writer, artist. Michigan. Business inquiries: kaijunobiz@gmail.com
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#this is so cuteprofessor-pastry-deactivated201 asked:
It’s a huge issue and a big reason why there’s such a dichotomy between scientists and the public recently, because there’s like this elitist ego bs a lot of scientists have
This doesn’t look like much, but these are RR Lyrae variable stars! They’re 10,500 light years way! I took about half of these pictures, and my classmates took the other half. I took the data and ran it through a few Python programs and made them into a gif! The observing period here was unfortunately only about 2 hours, but we got some good data!
The two stars here that are RR Lyrae variable stars are V* BH Peg and V* BG Peg (circled in the image below, BH Peg is the top star and BG Peg is the bottom).
RR Lyrae Variable stars are stars that are nearing the end of their life, and their luminosity changes periodically. There are non-RR Lyrae Variable stars that can have periods of years, or they may fluctuate irregularly.
RR Lyraes are really cool though! RR Lyraes are pulsating aging stars with a mass of around half the Sun’s. They’re thought to have previously shed mass during the Red-Giant Branch phase, and consequently, they were once stars with similar or slightly less mass than the Sun. Because of this, they’re super easy to use to gauge distances in our galaxy and local globular clusters (blobs of stars). But what’s even crazier is that they have periods of between 40 and 0.3 days. That’s super fast, cosmically speaking!
Oh! and the bottom star is an Eclipsing Binary! That means that one blob is actually two stars, and because of our vantage point from earth, they cross in front of each other!
V* BH Peg has a period of 0.6 days, and V* BG Peg has a period of 1.9 days.
Jam out and do your science homework with this science and sci-fi themed playlist!
Feel free to request other playlist themes here!
Anonymous asked:
2. And I’m stunned Bc he’s the first one I met there that has anything to do with cern and I’m a huge fangirl. He’s doing his PhD and is using some or the ATLAS data. He tells me to go to his office if I have any questions, and of course I go the next day with a friend of mine. We get in, sit down and the first thing he says is “I suppose you like physics to be here. So I’ll give you an advise. Don’t do Hugh energy physics. It’s dying, there are too many scientists and too little jobs,
3. there isn’t any more progress to be made. It was at its zenith on the beginning of the 20rh century, but then it died out. That’s just a friendly advice”. And, like, I knew all this. But to hear it from someone like him…. I honestly feel like high energy physics is the reason I’m in this world, I can’t see myself doing anything else and that was a slap in the face
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Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. First off, what kind of idiot says ‘yep there’s no more science to be done over here so let’s go somewhere else! The science here is all dried up!’ Like????
It’s also not uncommon for a prof to kind of build up a grad student with no intention of having said student replacing anyone but themselves. You see it a lot, actually, teaching to fill the task force rather than progress.
Don’t let that guy stop you from being who you want to be.
Mythbusters Physics: Relative Velocity
The Mythbusters tested what would happen if a ball was shot at 60 mph off the back of a truck travelling at 60 mph to see what would happen.
It became a perfect example of the relative nature of physics - showing that velocity can vectorially add together. 60 mph in one direction cancels the 60 mph in the other, meaning a net velocity of zero.
thanks, you discovered vectors. Fuck me sideways this is dumb
Yup, everyone has the same level of knowledge as you. There’s no one to learn anything from this.
Just to add, before the Mythbusters did this it was purely a thought experiment and had never been empirically tested at that point. So you are seeing in those two gifs the first actually test of that hypothesis since it had been proposed back in Newtons time.
As an astrophysicist I’d like to apologize for @surrenderless rude ass comment. We’re not all pretentious and like they said above, this was the first time this was ever tested. Imagine being so pretentious to something more profound like the double slit experiment.
1. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking — A book in which Hawking attempts to explain a range of subjects in cosmology to the non-specialist reader.
2. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson — The history of science through the stories of the people…
Anonymous asked:
probably
There’s this guy I’ve met in my time in the physics community and he’s this middle aged scary looking Russian man. He looks constantly pissed off and he’s around 6'4 so most people keep their distance from this guy, but I had to work in his lab. Anyway, I knew enough Russian and physics to win his respect and its so funny to imagine what the two of us must look like whenever we’re going somewhere. Like imagine an Aleksis Kaidanovsky looking character and a tiny pleb girl arguing in half Russian-half English about physics constantly
