Astronomy C

[bhavjain]

What is the typical density of a white dwarf?

[jonboyage]

Why is carbon monoxide an indicator of molecular hydrogen in interstellar dust clouds?

[Magikarpmaster629]

Why is carbon monoxide an indicator of molecular hydrogen in interstellar dust clouds?

This doesn't really pertain to the rules this year, but I suspect because carbon monoxide and molecular hydrogen only form in relatively cool environments.
This image of a system 490 parsecs distant depicts HM Cancri. This system has an orbital period of 5.4 minutes and an angular separation of 1.02*10^-6 arcseconds. What is the total mass of the system?

[Adi1008]

Why is carbon monoxide an indicator of molecular hydrogen in interstellar dust clouds?

This doesn't really pertain to the rules this year, but I suspect because carbon monoxide and molecular hydrogen only form in relatively cool environments.
This image of a system 490 parsecs distant depicts HM Cancri. This system has an orbital period of 5.4 minutes and an angular separation of 1.02*10^-6 arcseconds. What is the total mass of the system?

answer (Click to Show Hidden Text)

1.18 solar masses

[Magikarpmaster629]

Why is carbon monoxide an indicator of molecular hydrogen in interstellar dust clouds?

This doesn't really pertain to the rules this year, but I suspect because carbon monoxide and molecular hydrogen only form in relatively cool environments.
This image of a system 490 parsecs distant depicts HM Cancri. This system has an orbital period of 5.4 minutes and an angular separation of 1.02*10^-6 arcseconds. What is the total mass of the system?

answer (Click to Show Hidden Text)

1.18 solar masses

yep

[Adi1008]

This doesn't really pertain to the rules this year, but I suspect because carbon monoxide and molecular hydrogen only form in relatively cool environments.
This image of a system 490 parsecs distant depicts HM Cancri. This system has an orbital period of 5.4 minutes and an angular separation of 1.02*10^-6 arcseconds. What is the total mass of the system?

answer (Click to Show Hidden Text)

1.18 solar masses

yep

This figure shows maximum-light type Ia supernovae plotted with distance modulus on the x-axis and absolute B magnitude on the y-axis. Filled symbols are maximum–light SNe (174) and open symbols are limit SNe (395).

(a) What best explains the distribution falling off sharply at the brighter end?
(b) What do the slanted lines represent?
(c) There is a lack of dimmer supernovae found at farther distances. What would best explain this?
(d) What does the figure tell you about the frequency of superluminous (that is, unusually bright) type Ia supernovae? Essentially, in reality, are they more common, less common, or as common as one would expect from this figure?
(e) What is the name of the bias in (d)?

[Unome]

My attempt (Click to Show Hidden Text)

a) The Chandrasekhar limit. Type Ia supernovae brighter than roughly -19 magnitude are much more uncommon because they can't arise from mass accretion; they have to develop spontaneously or they will explode before they can get large enough to be over that magnitude.
b) Lines of equal temperature? (or something else like that, idk)
c) They are more difficult to detect because their apparent magnitude is much lower (probably a combination of being really dim and a lot of extinction).
d) No idea what this is even asking
e) Extinction bias? (maybe this is a real thing?)

[Adi1008]

My attempt (Click to Show Hidden Text)

a) The Chandrasekhar limit. Type Ia supernovae brighter than roughly -19 magnitude are much more uncommon because they can't arise from mass accretion; they have to develop spontaneously or they will explode before they can get large enough to be over that magnitude.
b) Lines of equal temperature? (or something else like that, idk)
c) They are more difficult to detect because their apparent magnitude is much lower (probably a combination of being really dim and a lot of extinction).
d) No idea what this is even asking
e) Extinction bias? (maybe this is a real thing?)

You're on the right track! (Click to Show Hidden Text)

a) I think this is pretty much it. Since the mass is limited by the Chandrasekhar limit, there's a hard physical limit to the amount of Nickel-56 that can be ejected during the supernova. Nickel-56 (and daughter Cobalt-56) is what powers the light curves of the supernova, so this serves as a hard limit for the maximum luminosity that the supernova can attain.
b) Good guess, but it's actually lines of consistent apparent magnitude! A harder followup question to this would be to calculate the specific apparent magnitude each line represents
c) That's pretty much it :)
d) Essentially, brighter objects are easier to discover, for obvious reasons. As a result, when you do surveys like this, you'll likely get most, if not all of the bright stuff, but you'll miss a lot of the dim stuff. As a result, the bright stuff will be overrepresented. In reality, superluminous supernovae are less common than one would initially predict from this plot. Since they already make up such a small fraction of the data, in real life, they are quite rare.
e) Malmquist bias!

[jonboyage]

Lets revive this

Do the light curves of type Ia supernovae drop faster when they have brighter or dimmer peak absolute magnitudes (example: -19.2 vs -18.7)?

[Unome]

Hopefully I remember this correctly (Click to Show Hidden Text)

dimmer drops faster?