I actually solved a quite similar problem last semester in my astrophysics course, maybe that will help you:
My problem was like this: given that ##\tau = 33## ms and ##\Delta \tau = 1.3 \cdot 10^{-5} s/year##, and given the mass ##M = 1.44 M_{sun}## and the radius ##R = 12 km##, we calculate...
To give some further input:
1) forces (pulling) are vectorial, which means they can be added by "putting them tip on tail". So, the net force is the sum over all forces.
2) Can you somehow determine the horizontal and vertical component of the forces?
Yep, that's pretty much it. I figured it out yesterday night, the plot now looks like this
So after a short distance nearly all alpha particles are absorbed or stopped by air molecules, and then the counts are pretty much 0 for higher distances.
Hello all you physics folks,
this is my first post, so if I screw this up, go easy on me :)
Here's the problem I'm working on and that I simply can't get my head wrapped around:
I have a table of 10 values of counts per second (cps) of alpha decay of Americium-241, depending on the...