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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Temple Of Immensity: For Choir And Electronics, Steven Naylor
The Temple Of Immensity: For Choir And Electronics, Steven Naylor
Honors Projects
the temple of immensity is a composition for 16-part choir and fixed media electronics composed by Steven Naylor using astronomical data concerning the stars nearest to Earth and their properties. “The temple of immensity” is an archaic and rarely used term, defined as “the universe or the complete overhead expanse of the heavens, especially as conceived as an object of religious reverence.” This piece seeks to convey feelings of wonder and awe for outer space through the setting of an original self-composed poem and through the use of star data to determine musical aspects. The resulting 28-minute composition blends voices …
Space Science And Social Media: Automating Science Communication On Twitter, Maia Williams
Space Science And Social Media: Automating Science Communication On Twitter, Maia Williams
Honors Projects
This project analyzes how social media is used to engage general audiences in astronomy and space science, as well as ways to improve engagement through automation. Tweets from five space science organizations were sampled. The engagement rate for each tweet was calculated from the number of interactions it received. Accounts that tweet more per day had more followers, and accounts with more followers received more interactions. This project also investigated how to build a Twitter bot to automate science communication. Using NASA Application Programming Interfaces, a Twitter bot was written in Python to tweet images taken by the NASA Mars …
Corrigendum: The Remote Observatories Of The Southeastern Association For Research In Astronomy (Sara), William C. Keel, Terry Oswalt, Peter Mack, Gary Henson, Todd Hillwig, Daniel Batcheldor, Robert Berrington, Chris De Pree, Dieter Hartmann, Martha Leake, Javier Licandro, Brian Murphy, James Webb, Matt A. Wood
Corrigendum: The Remote Observatories Of The Southeastern Association For Research In Astronomy (Sara), William C. Keel, Terry Oswalt, Peter Mack, Gary Henson, Todd Hillwig, Daniel Batcheldor, Robert Berrington, Chris De Pree, Dieter Hartmann, Martha Leake, Javier Licandro, Brian Murphy, James Webb, Matt A. Wood
Publications
Bill Gray of Project Pluto brought to our attention an error of 0.03° in the listed latitude of our Kitt Peak telescope. While correcting the table where this occurred, we also take the opportunity to update the instrument properties and weather statistics of our remote telescopes
How And Why Mars Lost Its Water, Sana Akhter, Andre Beikircher
How And Why Mars Lost Its Water, Sana Akhter, Andre Beikircher
2021 Honors Council of the Illinois Region
The topic of this paper is to investigate how and why Mars lost its water. It is important to study the loss of water on Mars because it can give us a better understanding of how Mars once looked, if life were possible, and how it could have changed so drastically to what it is now. The paper aims to address which factors led to Mars losing its water and how long ago this happened. Using our data, we will predict how quickly Mars’ core cooled, when its magnetic field weakened, and when the water was lost. We learned that …
Concentrated Lunar Resources: Imminent Implications For Governance And Justice, Martin Elvis, Alanna Krolikowski, Tony Milligan
Concentrated Lunar Resources: Imminent Implications For Governance And Justice, Martin Elvis, Alanna Krolikowski, Tony Milligan
History and Political Science Faculty Research & Creative Works
Numerous missions planned for the next decade are likely to target a handful of small sites of interest on the Moon's surface, creating risks of crowding and interference at these locations. The Moon presents finite and scarce areas with rare topography or concentrations of resources of special value. Locations of interest to science, notably for astronomy, include the Peaks of Eternal Light, the coldest of the cold traps and smooth areas on the far side. Regions richest in physical resources could also be uniquely suited to settlement and commerce. Such sites of interest are both few and small. Typically, there …
Axial Symmetry Tests Of Milky Way Disk Stars Probe The Galaxy's Matter Distribution, Austin Hinkel
Axial Symmetry Tests Of Milky Way Disk Stars Probe The Galaxy's Matter Distribution, Austin Hinkel
Theses and Dissertations--Physics and Astronomy
In Galactic dynamics, various assumptions have been employed for mathematical ease. These assumptions are approximately valid, but departures reveal perturbations on our Galaxy. In this dissertation, we select a complete, Gaia DR2 data set, and using this data, we find evidence for axial symmetry breaking in the Galaxy, away from the spiral arms and the Galactic bar. This asymmetry is compatible with a prolate dark matter halo tilted with respect to the disk, with a long axis pointing in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds, and this matches an inventory of nearby torques. These asymmetries vary North and South of …
Brightening Of The Bridge: Reflections Of A Past Sgr A* Outburst In Galactic Center Molecular Clouds, Nathalie Kanoelani Takiko Jones
Brightening Of The Bridge: Reflections Of A Past Sgr A* Outburst In Galactic Center Molecular Clouds, Nathalie Kanoelani Takiko Jones
Senior Projects Spring 2021
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is located more than 200,000 trillion km from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. At the very center of our galaxy is a super-massive black hole called Sagittarius A$^{*}$. The black hole is surrounded by many interesting objects, including molecular clouds. Molecular clouds are large, cold clouds of gas in which stars are formed. Telescopes like NuSTAR have observed X-rays (radiation 10,000 times higher in energy than visible light) coming from these molecular clouds. Since cold gas cannot create such high energy emission by itself, there must be some external source of radiation interacting …
Monitoring Agns With H-Beta Asymmetry: Markarian 841, Samuel J. Schonsberg
Monitoring Agns With H-Beta Asymmetry: Markarian 841, Samuel J. Schonsberg
Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts
Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the Universe, and the mechanism behind their luminosity was shrouded in mystery decades after their discovery. Since then, we have found that these objects are active galactic nuclei (AGN), which are powered by actively-feeding super massive black holes at the center of a galaxy. But we still know fairly little about the structure and motion of the material surrounding active super massive black holes, and most of these objects are not resolvable by conventional observations. We use a technique called reverberation mapping, which is traditionally used only as a mass determination …