#vicisastro — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #vicisastro, aggregated by home.social.
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It's only since Cecilia Payne's PhD thesis in 1925, that we know what the stars - and our Sun - are made of: mostly hydrogen.
Her thesis was described as ""the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy" and it extremely readable: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1925PhDT.........1P/abstract
Yet It took until 1956, 10 years before her retirement, for her to become full professor - because women were barred from becoming full professors at Harvard.
(Posted because she was born #OTD).
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What next for this research?
1. Apply methods to more sources! Also to build a sample and test different star & binary properties e.g. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023A%26A...674A.147D/abstract & https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021MNRAS.501.5646M/abstract
2. Refine methods (better statistics tools, take more effects into account ...) - e.g. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230414201H/abstract
3. And of course we hope for better data with #XRISM and #Athena missions!#VicisAstro #XraysAreTheBestRays #SciArt #scicomm #wisskomm #VicisArt
11/11 -
Where we use a method originally used for AGN to answer the question whether
we can use variability in individual X-ray lines to probe the variable stellar wind.And the answer is: yes, we can!
The paper (submitted not yet refereed) is:
"Stellar wind variability in Cygnus X-1 from high-resolution excess
variance spectroscopy with Chandra" by Härer et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14201Let me disentangle what the title means: 1/6
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Why space-based telescopes like #XMMNewton or #JWST? Because our atmosphere is incredibly good at filtering out radiation that is not in the visible or radio range.
That's obviously pretty good for humanity overall, but kinda inconvenient if we want to observe highly energetic X-ray photons from close to black holes or peer deep into stellar nurseries using infra-red light.
Image credit: OpenStax, Rice University, modified from STScI/JHU/NASA
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Why space-based telescopes like #XMMNewton or #JWST? Because our atmosphere is incredibly good at filtering out radiation that is not in the visible or radio range.
That's obviously pretty good for humanity overall, but kinda inconvenient if we want to observe highly energetic X-ray photons from close to black holes or peer deep into stellar nurseries using infra-red light.
Image credit: OpenStax, Rice University, modified from STScI/JHU/NASA