Recent content by FTL_Diesel

The differentiation of the Earth didn't require the Moon-forming impact to occur - after all, the rest of the terrestrial planets (and some asteroids) are differentiated as well. As I understand it, the exact reason for why Venus is not geologically active (or why it does not have a core...

So, one thing to note is that these days, there is no difference between an astrophysicist and an astronomer. 100 years ago, the term "astrophysicist" was used specifically to refer to a scientist who used the new techniques of spectroscopy to study the physics of astronomical objects, while an...

One thing you might try is looking for which schools have good graduate astro programs, and then see how hard it is to do undergrad research there with professors.

Amen to that. "Eighty percent of success is showing up."

Seconded. If you want to go to astronomy grad school, you should be finding ways to do good research as an undergrad, and get a decent physics background. I don't know about physics at either of those two schools. I would say that in terms of research projects, the two main ways you can get...

I'll throw in U. of Michigan, U. of Arizona, U. of Texas (Austin) and Ohio State University. They all have good astro graduate programs and access to telescope time. That means as an undergrad you can get jobs working on real, good research with well-known professors (which is vital; all these...

Ignition, do you know what you'd like to use your telescope for? If you want to do astrophotography you'll need a eq. mount for star tracking, but if you just want to look at things, I'll second Saladsamurai's suggestion about the alt-az dobsonians. You can probably get a bigger dobsonian for...

Ah, what they're describing in the paper isn't a matrix, it's best viewed as a probability density function. If you wanted to display it as a probability distribution, you would just plot v^{-5394}, but would need to multiply it by a normalization constant. That constant (using latex...

That just means that the distribution of micrometeorite velocities between 11.2 and 72 km/s looks like the plot of v^{-5394}. i.e. - it falls off really steeply as velocity increases.

I'll second what's been said about learning a language like C++ or fortran if you want to run large mathematical simulations. Pretty much everything in astronomy is written in one of those two. That being so, the amount of programing skills you actually need are pretty minimal. After all, most...

You can work it out yourself fairly easily. When the Sun passes through your local meridian (i.e. - noon), your local sidereal time is whatever right ascension the Sun is at. Right now, the Sun is at ~2h54m. To get to 13h00m, you therefore need to wait 13:00-2:54=10:06. That would mean that...

But that depends on the initial conditions of the system, as well as a host of other factors (like the q-factor, for one). If this is fiction, then we can easily come up with a scenario where tidal locking has occurred by a (tectonically) reasonable date. No?

How do you mean?

I'm not clear why you need the moon to be at least 10% the mass of the planet for a tidally locked system to be dynamically stable. The Earth and Moon are heading towards this scenario themselves (albeit in several billion years). Or is it because you need enough mass in the moon to make the...

I think that SkyCalc might do this. Perhaps digging through the source code will provide some answers? What's this for? Pulsar timing?