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Great blog, Teoita. Nice to see science getting its due attention on TL :D
Maybe I should write a similar blog for particle physics/quantum mechanics. That's my field, after all. Would be a nice accompaniment to this blog - the large and the small! Plus there do seem to be a lot of misconceptions about QM floating around this thread
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Italy12246 Posts
That would be awesome
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Just wanted to say this was very intresting to read. Ty!
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As a fellow Master's student currently writing a thesis in Astrophysics, excellent blog.
Very cool!
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Italy12246 Posts
Thanks What's your thesis on? I have a couple of exams to go and will start mine this fall, i'm thinking of doing something about AGN since i've always found that fascinating, but i'm not 100% sure yet.
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It is on dust formation in AGB stars. Nothing really ground breaking, but extremely interesting. The molecule I am looking at only has one data point in experiments though so its very very theoretical treatment hehe.
AGN is fascinating as well, but I guess that applies to everything in the field. So much of it is amazing. Good luck on your exams, those last few are the most tense! Are you currently studying in Italy?
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Italy12246 Posts
Yeah, there's a university in Milan called Bicocca that has a Master's program that is 100% astrophysics so i'm doing that. Lots of universities have like 3-4 astrophysics exams that try rush to explain everything from stellar astrophysics to cosmology, plus a bunch of generic classes, and to be fair i was like fuck that shit why would i even do a half arsed particle physics exam because i have to, while also half arsing it in astrophysics.
Once i graduate i'll look for a phd around Europe. Unfortunately Italy is a god awful country for scientific research, the funds just aren't there and researchers are underpaid and treated like shit compared to the rest of the world, so if you want to go make a career out of it you are almost forced to move abroad. We have some of the best universities as far as actually teaching us stuff goes, but after that it's just downhill. The upside is, italian scientists tend to be really appreciated and really good because the selection is so tough, only the best and most committed actually make it.
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A good read, Teo, even if I was familiar with quite a lot of what was said. Best of luck your masters degree and getting into the astrophysics biz. Looking forward to more of these blogs :D
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Interesting. I am currently studying in Berlin, Germany. I do my thesis for my main institution at another university that specializes more in Astronomy/Astrophysics. Seems weird, but the universities here all have an agreement where they can allow students to attend classes, do theses, etc between them.
One of the most unfortunate things about Physics in general is that the students are always "rushed" to catch up with the fast developments of the field. Just so much information has come out since the developments of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, experimental applications. The density is unbelievable.
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Thanks very much for this post. Was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I did my bachelor's in Physics, and I added quite a number of astronomy/astrophysics courses. For my undergrad thesis I made a statistical model of # of gamma ray bursts vs Flux for exploding primordial black holes as would be visible to one of the instruments on the fermi gamma telescope. The end result was that the fluxes were way too low, and that at the high flux end the log-log slope was too close to that of just natural expansion. Still it was a really fun project, and my advisor loved it because I made him all sorts of scripts to calculate useful stuff (redshift to proper distance and FLRW metric to calculate R/R0). It's all a touch blurry since I was working on this stuff like 8+ years ago.
I eventually ended up like EM a touch more so I went the electrical engineering route. I'm happy with what I do, but on occasion I wonder what it would have been like to go the astronomy route. I still have a copy of PJE Peebles' Physical Cosmology, I think I'll read through it slowly and try to digest it.
Anyway thanks again!
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United States24614 Posts
Wow I'm actually mildly surprised by the number of users with physics backgrounds this blog attracted.
Also, someone finally mentioned gamma ray bursts!
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Italy12246 Posts
On April 26 2015 22:51 revy wrote: Thanks very much for this post. Was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I did my bachelor's in Physics, and I added quite a number of astronomy/astrophysics courses. For my undergrad thesis I made a statistical model of # of gamma ray bursts vs Flux for exploding primordial black holes as would be visible to one of the instruments on the fermi gamma telescope. The end result was that the fluxes were way too low, and that at the high flux end the log-log slope was too close to that of just natural expansion. Still it was a really fun project, and my advisor loved it because I made him all sorts of scripts to calculate useful stuff (redshift to proper distance and FLRW metric to calculate R/R0). It's all a touch blurry since I was working on this stuff like 8+ years ago.
I eventually ended up like EM a touch more so I went the electrical engineering route. I'm happy with what I do, but on occasion I wonder what it would have been like to go the astronomy route. I still have a copy of PJE Peebles' Physical Cosmology, I think I'll read through it slowly and try to digest it.
Anyway thanks again!
You are welcome 
I've done my bachelor thesis on Gamma Ray Bursts myself, although i focused on ultra long GRBs.
Out of curiosity, how does the primordial black hole evaporation tie with GRBs? All i know is that it's a suggested explanation, but most people prefer the collapsar models. I guess the gamma radiation is the tail end of Hawking's radiation? How would you explain the afterglow?
And yeah, i didn't mention GRB's in the OP since Hubble specifically hasn't contributed all that much to their study, other than occasionally studying afterglows
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On April 25 2015 02:29 Serejai wrote: So what kind of telescope do I need to attach my camera to in order to take some sweet ass stellar photos? As far as I am aware you'll need to take infrared photos from a telescope in space and massively photoshop them for color and contrast.
These pictures are great, but you should remember that they have been edited for the general public, not for scientific value.
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Italy12246 Posts
You dont need an IR camera, all you need is separate filters. Take one picture per filter of the same source and combine them digitally.
But yeah, scientific images aren't nearly as pretty.
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On April 26 2015 23:01 Teoita wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2015 22:51 revy wrote: Thanks very much for this post. Was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I did my bachelor's in Physics, and I added quite a number of astronomy/astrophysics courses. For my undergrad thesis I made a statistical model of # of gamma ray bursts vs Flux for exploding primordial black holes as would be visible to one of the instruments on the fermi gamma telescope. The end result was that the fluxes were way too low, and that at the high flux end the log-log slope was too close to that of just natural expansion. Still it was a really fun project, and my advisor loved it because I made him all sorts of scripts to calculate useful stuff (redshift to proper distance and FLRW metric to calculate R/R0). It's all a touch blurry since I was working on this stuff like 8+ years ago.
I eventually ended up like EM a touch more so I went the electrical engineering route. I'm happy with what I do, but on occasion I wonder what it would have been like to go the astronomy route. I still have a copy of PJE Peebles' Physical Cosmology, I think I'll read through it slowly and try to digest it.
Anyway thanks again! You are welcome  I've done my bachelor thesis on Gamma Ray Bursts myself, although i focused on ultra long GRBs. Out of curiosity, how does the primordial black hole evaporation tie with GRBs? All i know is that it's a suggested explanation, but most people prefer the collapsar models. I guess the gamma radiation is the tail end of Hawking's radiation? How would you explain the afterglow? And yeah, i didn't mention GRB's in the OP since Hubble specifically hasn't contributed all that much to their study, other than occasionally studying afterglows I'm pretty sure the curve of energy release is all wrong. An evaporating black hole emits energy at an exponential rate. If you look at the curve of flux from a supernova it sort of increases, levels off, and then slowly falls. Black hole evaporation is very violent. Also, you wouldn't get a black hole to evaporate in a region that has enough material to form a remnant nebula, as it would gain mass faster than it loses mass. Edit: Also, all black holes should release about the same energy (equal to about the rest mass of the moon, ~6.6 x 10^39 J), and supernovae are more complex events, with type I and type II and their subtypes. Also, Supernovae emit a few orders of magnitude more energy than black holes evaporating.
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Italy12246 Posts
I'm not sure it's that simple though; GRB prompt emission lightcurves are really really variable (and violent), and they are not the same as the associated supernovas (which are only type 1b or 1c) that long GRBs show, which becomes visibile after the initial GRB. Also as the black hole evaporates its Eddington limit decreases, so i can see how sometimes it may not accrete enough matter to stop evaporating
Seeing as black hole evaporation has never actually been detected, and its full understanding requires quantizing gravity anyway, it sounds like you are oversimplifying things, but if they are supposed to release that little energy (why is that by the way? Do they all detonate at a similar point like type 1a supernovae?) then yeah, they are nowhere close what GRB's emit.
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On April 27 2015 01:31 spinesheath wrote:Show nested quote +On April 25 2015 02:29 Serejai wrote: So what kind of telescope do I need to attach my camera to in order to take some sweet ass stellar photos? As far as I am aware you'll need to take infrared photos from a telescope in space and massively photoshop them for color and contrast. These pictures are great, but you should remember that they have been edited for the general public, not for scientific value.
You can actually make pretty great images of the sky using just a DSLR camera and a good lens - the only "special" thing you need is a mount with a clock drive to compensate for the rotation of the Earth - and actually there is even the possibility to do all-sky images with very fast fish-eye lenses, those you can do just from a fixed tripod and at very dark locations, you can get really stunning images in even in this very simple way.
If you want to do semi-wide shots of the sky (think 50-100 mm lens), you can buy a mount for $100 and have a lot of fun (I sure did), if you want to use a real telescope and work with focal lengths around a meter (more is very rarely useful), then it gets more complex, because mounts that can track Earth rotation so precisely are terribly expensive and thus you need autoguiding - anyway, for $1000 you can already get a somewhat decent setup and feel like you have a small Hubble in your garden.
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If you opt for academics later on, I hope you have more positions over wherever you are than in France :D. Astrophysics is typically one of those subjects where many ultra good profiles will battle for very few positions.
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I actually had never heard of prompt GRBs. Anyways, Hawking Radiation is basically similar to blackbody radiation, and the temperature is given by T = h_bar * c^3 / ( 8 pi G M k) , where M is the mass, k is Boltzmann constant, h_bar is reduced Planck constant. Putting all the mks constants in, you have T = 1.2 x 10^23 * M^-1 . If the "effective temperature" is higher than the background temperature (About 3 K), than the black hole will radiate more than it absorbs as long as it is far away from sources of matter. I got the figure for energy from this. If you set 1.2 x 10^23 M^-1 = 3K, the answer is roughly the mass of the moon (off by about a factor of two, but ...), and all of the mass of the black hole is converted to photons.
All of the equations in here can be found here (and prettier :D), but there isn't much theoretical development. Wikipedia
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Italy12246 Posts
You misunderstood what i said; long GRBs (the ones associated with supernovae) emit light in two phases, called the prompt emission and the afterglow. Prompt emission is the actual gamma burst, which lasts from a few seconds to several minutes, and it's the most violent since it's mostly gamma rays. The light curve (ie flux emitted over time) of prompt emission is completely different from a supernova; if one is associated with the GRB, it can only be seen for very long times once the afterglow is fading.
Your calculation doesn't include the fact that the CMB radiation temperature actually increases with redshift as 1+z, and GRB's are seen at redshifts as high as 9 (meaning CMB temperature ends up being 30 K instead of 3), which doesnt help. You are also assuming there is no accretion but let's not go there
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