The Fixed Stars

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Fixed Stars The Fixed (?) Stars At a recent astronomical seminar, I was reminded by a speaker that our term, the "fixed stars" is not really correct. Stars do move across the sky, their motion being a combination of two mea­ surable quantities,"radial velocity", or motion in the line of sight, and "proper motion",motion across the line of sight. These motions are extremely slow, although they can be measured with accurate astronomical instruments. To the unaided eye, however, the stars appear to be stationary, unless studied over a lengthy period of time. Edmond Halley realized this, for he astutely observed that some of the stars were not in the positions assigned to them by the ancient Greek astronomers. He began a study to determine the move­ ments that the "fixed" stars had made since the time of Ptolemy. It can be seen that the movement made by the average star, during a man's lifetime, will hardly be observable, and I am wondering how many of us have actually seen a star move. There are certain stars whose motions are detectable in a relatively short period of years. These are short-period binary, or double, stars. The observational procedure would be to observe these stars at two- or three-year intervals. During that time, the stars will have revolved a bit in their orbits, and the change in relative positions should be seen. One such binary is 46 Tauri. It is easily visible in small tele­ scopes since both components have visual magnitudes of 6.1 . The period of revolution is 7.2 years, so that you should see a change in just one year. The position of 46 Tauri is as follows: R.A . 4h10.9m, Dec.+07°35' . It is just south of Mu Tauri, which will be on most star maps. Astronomers have been saying for years that the stars are in motion, but not one person in a thousand has ever bothered to prove it for himself. Through observation of a short-period binary, such as 46 Tauri, an interested person can demonstrate that the stars are not "fixed" and can follow their motion from year to year. K.E.Chilton, Hamilton,Ont..
Recommended publications
  • Fixed Stars More Than the Wandering Planets Used by Modern Astrologers
    Ancients used the fixed stars more than the wandering planets used by modern astrologers. With improved technical abilities due to software enhancements, the fixed stars are beginning to make a return in present day astrology. The information contained in these pages is just a sampling of the stars and their meanings. It is designed to encourage you to look at the subject in a deeper level. When you blend the meaning of the fixed stars with the natal planets in your chart, it adds a great deal of texture to the understanding of your planet/star combination. I normally use a three degree orb of influence between stars and planets, but the commonly accepted orb is only one degree. A research project I did several years ago indicated that people felt the effects of the stars from this wider distance (which can amount to millions of miles). For example, if the planet Mercury in your natal chart is at 17° Gemini, then you will find on page four that item T is the star Rigel in the Orion constellation. Stars that are in the feet of a constellation are considered to be teacher stars in that they bring higher information down to earth to be used. Mercury represents communications, education, writing, and short trips. Combined, this could be a teacher of higher information, possibly a person who travels or writes as part of the teaching process. Again, this is a partial list of stars. Listed below are some of the books and references I have used. REFERENCE: The interpretations come from Bernadette Brady’s “Book of Fixed Stars”, the Solar Maps software program http://www.bernadettebrady.com/; , Ebertin-Hoffman’s book Fixed Stars,” Vivian Robson’s “The Fixed Stars & Constellations in Astrology” and miscellaneous sources.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction to Astronomy from Darkness to Blazing Glory
    Introduction to Astronomy From Darkness to Blazing Glory Published by JAS Educational Publications Copyright Pending 2010 JAS Educational Publications All rights reserved. Including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Second Edition Author: Jeffrey Wright Scott Photographs and Diagrams: Credit NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USGS, NOAA, Aames Research Center JAS Educational Publications 2601 Oakdale Road, H2 P.O. Box 197 Modesto California 95355 1-888-586-6252 Website: http://.Introastro.com Printing by Minuteman Press, Berkley, California ISBN 978-0-9827200-0-4 1 Introduction to Astronomy From Darkness to Blazing Glory The moon Titan is in the forefront with the moon Tethys behind it. These are two of many of Saturn’s moons Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA 2 Introduction to Astronomy Contents in Brief Chapter 1: Astronomy Basics: Pages 1 – 6 Workbook Pages 1 - 2 Chapter 2: Time: Pages 7 - 10 Workbook Pages 3 - 4 Chapter 3: Solar System Overview: Pages 11 - 14 Workbook Pages 5 - 8 Chapter 4: Our Sun: Pages 15 - 20 Workbook Pages 9 - 16 Chapter 5: The Terrestrial Planets: Page 21 - 39 Workbook Pages 17 - 36 Mercury: Pages 22 - 23 Venus: Pages 24 - 25 Earth: Pages 25 - 34 Mars: Pages 34 - 39 Chapter 6: Outer, Dwarf and Exoplanets Pages: 41-54 Workbook Pages 37 - 48 Jupiter: Pages 41 - 42 Saturn: Pages 42 - 44 Uranus: Pages 44 - 45 Neptune: Pages 45 - 46 Dwarf Planets, Plutoids and Exoplanets: Pages 47 -54 3 Chapter 7: The Moons: Pages: 55 - 66 Workbook Pages 49 - 56 Chapter 8: Rocks and Ice:
    [Show full text]
  • Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sufi and His Book of the Fixed Stars: a Journey of Re-Discovery
    ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following reference: Hafez, Ihsan (2010) Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi and his book of the fixed stars: a journey of re-discovery. PhD thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/28854/ The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owner of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please contact [email protected] and quote http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/28854/ 5.1 Extant Manuscripts of al-Ṣūfī’s Book Al-Ṣūfī’s ‘Book of the Fixed Stars’ dating from around A.D. 964, is one of the most important medieval Arabic treatises on astronomy. This major work contains an extensive star catalogue, which lists star co-ordinates and magnitude estimates, as well as detailed star charts. Other topics include descriptions of nebulae and Arabic folk astronomy. As I mentioned before, al-Ṣūfī’s work was first translated into Persian by al-Ṭūsī. It was also translated into Spanish in the 13th century during the reign of King Alfonso X. The introductory chapter of al-Ṣūfī’s work was first translated into French by J.J.A. Caussin de Parceval in 1831. However in 1874 it was entirely translated into French again by Hans Karl Frederik Schjellerup, whose work became the main reference used by most modern astronomical historians. In 1956 al-Ṣūfī’s Book of the fixed stars was printed in its original Arabic language in Hyderabad (India) by Dārat al-Ma‘aref al-‘Uthmānīa.
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking Outside the Sphere Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel Thinking Outside the Sphere
    Thinking Outside the Sphere Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel Thinking Outside the Sphere A Constellation of Rare Books from the History of Science Collection The exhibition was made possible by generous support from Mr. & Mrs. James B. Hebenstreit and Mrs. Lathrop M. Gates. CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION Linda Hall Library Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology Cynthia J. Rogers, Curator 5109 Cherry Street Kansas City MO 64110 1 Thinking Outside the Sphere is held in copyright by the Linda Hall Library, 2010, and any reproduction of text or images requires permission. The Linda Hall Library is an independently funded library devoted to science, engineering and technology which is used extensively by The exhibition opened at the Linda Hall Library April 22 and closed companies, academic institutions and individuals throughout the world. September 18, 2010. The Library was established by the wills of Herbert and Linda Hall and opened in 1946. It is located on a 14 acre arboretum in Kansas City, Missouri, the site of the former home of Herbert and Linda Hall. Sources of images on preliminary pages: Page 1, cover left: Peter Apian. Cosmographia, 1550. We invite you to visit the Library or our website at www.lindahlll.org. Page 1, right: Camille Flammarion. L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, 1888. Page 3, Table of contents: Leonhard Euler. Theoria motuum planetarum et cometarum, 1744. 2 Table of Contents Introduction Section1 The Ancient Universe Section2 The Enduring Earth-Centered System Section3 The Sun Takes
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:1906.03269V2 [Astro-Ph.EP] 17 Jun 2019
    Draft version June 18, 2019 Typeset using LATEX twocolumn style in AASTeX62 The Degree of Alignment Between Circumbinary Disks and Their Binary Hosts 1, 1, 2 3 4 3 Ian Czekala, ∗ Eugene Chiang, Sean M. Andrews, Eric L. N. Jensen, Guillermo Torres, David J. Wilner,3 Keivan G. Stassun,5, 6 and Bruce Macintosh7 1Department of Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley, Campbell Hall, CA 94720-3411, USA 2Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California at Berkeley, McCone Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4767, USA 3Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA j 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA 5Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, 6301 Stevenson Center, Nashville, TN 37235, USA 6Department of Physics, Fisk University, Nashville, TN 37208, USA 7Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, 452 Lomita Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA ABSTRACT All four circumbinary (CB) protoplanetary disks orbiting short-period (P < 20 day) double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2s)|a group that includes UZ Tau E, for which we present new ALMA data|exhibit sky-plane inclinations idisk which match, to within a few degrees, the sky-plane incli- nations i? of their stellar hosts. Although for these systems the true mutual inclinations θ between disk and binary cannot be directly measured because relative nodal angles are unknown, the near- coincidence of idisk and i? suggests that θ is small for these most compact of systems. We confirm this hypothesis using a hierarchical Bayesian analysis, showing that 68% of CB disks around short-period SB2s have θ < 3:0◦.
    [Show full text]
  • FIXED STARS a SOLAR WRITER REPORT for Churchill Winston WRITTEN by DIANA K ROSENBERG Page 2
    FIXED STARS A SOLAR WRITER REPORT for Churchill Winston WRITTEN BY DIANA K ROSENBERG Page 2 Prepared by Cafe Astrology cafeastrology.com Page 23 Churchill Winston Natal Chart Nov 30 1874 1:30 am GMT +0:00 Blenhein Castle 51°N48' 001°W22' 29°‚ 53' Tropical ƒ Placidus 02' 23° „ Ý 06° 46' Á ¿ 21° 15° Ý 06' „ 25' 23° 13' Œ À ¶29° Œ 28° … „ Ü É Ü 06° 36' 26' 25° 43' Œ 51'Ü áá Œ 29° ’ 29° “ àà … ‘ à ‹ – 55' á á 55' á †32' 16° 34' ¼ † 23° 51'Œ 23° ½ † 06' 25° “ ’ † Ê ’ ‹ 43' 35' 35' 06° ‡ Š 17° 43' Œ 09° º ˆ 01' 01' 07° ˆ ‰ ¾ 23° 22° 08° 02' ‡ ¸ Š 46' » Ï 06° 29°ˆ 53' ‰ Page 234 Astrological Summary Chart Point Positions: Churchill Winston Planet Sign Position House Comment The Moon Leo 29°Le36' 11th The Sun Sagittarius 7°Sg43' 3rd Mercury Scorpio 17°Sc35' 2nd Venus Sagittarius 22°Sg01' 3rd Mars Libra 16°Li32' 1st Jupiter Libra 23°Li34' 1st Saturn Aquarius 9°Aq35' 5th Uranus Leo 15°Le13' 11th Neptune Aries 28°Ar26' 8th Pluto Taurus 21°Ta25' 8th The North Node Aries 25°Ar51' 8th The South Node Libra 25°Li51' 2nd The Ascendant Virgo 29°Vi55' 1st The Midheaven Gemini 29°Ge53' 10th The Part of Fortune Capricorn 8°Cp01' 4th Chart Point Aspects Planet Aspect Planet Orb App/Sep The Moon Semisquare Mars 1°56' Applying The Moon Trine Neptune 1°10' Separating The Moon Trine The North Node 3°45' Separating The Moon Sextile The Midheaven 0°17' Applying The Sun Semisquare Jupiter 0°50' Applying The Sun Sextile Saturn 1°52' Applying The Sun Trine Uranus 7°30' Applying Mercury Square Uranus 2°21' Separating Mercury Opposition Pluto 3°49' Applying Venus Sextile
    [Show full text]
  • Volatiles in Protoplanetary Disks
    Volatiles in Protoplanetary Disks Thesis by Ke Zhang In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 2015 (Defended May 15, 2015) ii c 2015 Ke Zhang All Rights Reserved iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Geoffrey Blake, for his patience, guidance, support, and inspiration that made this thesis possible. In retrospect, I am so grateful to have chosen Geoff as my mentor. He is a very special kind of advisor, so rare in the fast-paced world, who can be incredibly patient, waiting for a student to find her passion. But once the student has made up her mind, and starts to ask for resources, opportunities, and attention, he is so supportive and resourceful that the only limitation for the student is herself. It was a great privilege working with Geoff, who is ingeniously creative and vastly knowledgeable. Thank you for all the lessons, support, and, most importantly, for believing in and encouraging me. I'm also thankful for John Carpenter who opened for me the wonderful door of (sub)mm-wave interferometry and gave me a very first opportunity to work with ALMA data. John, you are my role model as a rigorous scientist who understands his field profoundly and is dedicated to getting things right. I would also like to thank Colette Salyk for being such a great mentor and a supportive friend during my years in graduate school. Thanks for taking me to the summit of Mauna Kea and beautiful Charlottesville.
    [Show full text]
  • Sylvia Plath's Fixed Stars
    Sylvia Plath’s Fixed Stars by Catherine Rankovic Sylvia Plath’s Fixed Stars Sylvia Plath’s birth. Plath was born October 27, 1932 at 2:10 p.m. in Boston, Massachusetts. “Fixed stars” are all the stars in the sky assigned Mathematical formulae and atlases terrestrial to the units called constellations. The brighter and sidereal permit astrologers to draw up from this information an astronomically accurate, - two-dimensional 360-degree diagram called a acter and life events. Given the resonance of natal chart or birth chart, uniquely Plath’s and the concluding words “[f]ixed stars / Govern a forever hers. [Fig. 1] It will lead us to Plath’s na- life,” in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Words,” I wanted - Western astrology, the type practiced by Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, who all his adult life used astrology as an augury and for character analy- sis. Plath’s readership will then be familiar with Plath’s natal chart, information neither Plath nor Hughes left in writing. In our century, the only excuse for attention to astrology is that there appears to be some- do “govern a life,” or whether Plath or Hughes 1 Taking the subject about as seriously as Hughes did, and using, as he did, Western astrology’s classic geocentric method, we begin with the facts of 1 Ted Hughes in the poem “A Dream,” p. 118 in Birthday Let- 15 SPECIAL FEATURE - was “psychic” or intuitive, requiring a knack, but that is never true: Chart interpretation and prognostication are skills and arts anyone can acquire through instruction, readings, case stud- ies, and practice; one might even add to the lit- erature by becoming a scholar.4 Astrologers use Plath’s natal Sun was in the zodiac sign Scorpio case studies as jurists use precedents.
    [Show full text]
  • Numerical Simulations of Stellar Jets and Comparison Between Synthetic and Observed Maps: Clues to the Launch Mechanism
    A&A 567, A13 (2014) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201322171 & c ESO 2014 Astrophysics Numerical simulations of stellar jets and comparison between synthetic and observed maps: clues to the launch mechanism F. Rubini1, L. Maurri1,G.Inghirami1,2, F. Bacciotti3, and L. Del Zanna1,2,3 1 Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Firenze, via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto F. no, Firenze, Italy 2 INFN – Sezione di Firenze, via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto F. no, Firenze, Italy 3 INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy Received 28 June 2013 / Accepted 14 April 2014 ABSTRACT High angular resolution spectra obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (HST/STIS) provide rich morpho- logical and kinematical information about the stellar jet phenomenon, which allows us to test theoretical models efficiently. In this work, numerical simulations of stellar jets in the propagation region are executed with the PLUTO code, by adopting inflow condi- tions that arise from former numerical simulations of magnetized outflows, accelerated by the disk-wind mechanism in the launching region. By matching the two regions, information about the magneto-centrifugal accelerating mechanism underlying a given astro- physical object can be extrapolated by comparing synthetic and observed position-velocity diagrams. We show that quite different jets, like those from the young T Tauri stars DG-Tau and RW-Aur, may originate from the same disk-wind model for different config- urations of the magnetic field at the disk surface. This result supports the idea that all the observed jets may be generated by the same mechanism.
    [Show full text]
  • GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution
    GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy Special Publications No. 1 George Herbig in 1960 —————————————————————– GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution —————————————————————– Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy University of Hawaii at Manoa 640 North Aohoku Place Hilo, HI 96720 USA . Dedicated to Hannelore Herbig c 2016 by Bo Reipurth Version 1.0 – April 19, 2016 Cover Image: The HH 24 complex in the Lynds 1630 cloud in Orion was discov- ered by Herbig and Kuhi in 1963. This near-infrared HST image shows several collimated Herbig-Haro jets emanating from an embedded multiple system of T Tauri stars. Courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute. This book can be referenced as follows: Reipurth, B. 2016, http://ifa.hawaii.edu/SP1 i FOREWORD I first learned about George Herbig’s work when I was a teenager. I grew up in Denmark in the 1950s, a time when Europe was healing the wounds after the ravages of the Second World War. Already at the age of 7 I had fallen in love with astronomy, but information was very hard to come by in those days, so I scraped together what I could, mainly relying on the local library. At some point I was introduced to the magazine Sky and Telescope, and soon invested my pocket money in a subscription. Every month I would sit at our dining room table with a dictionary and work my way through the latest issue. In one issue I read about Herbig-Haro objects, and I was completely mesmerized that these objects could be signposts of the formation of stars, and I dreamt about some day being able to contribute to this field of study.
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:1711.08652V1 [Astro-Ph.SR] 23 Nov 2017 4 Graduate Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, No
    Draft version October 11, 2018 Preprint typeset using LATEX style emulateapj v. 01/23/15 STAR-DISK INTERACTIONS IN MULTI-BAND PHOTOMETRIC MONITORING OF THE CLASSICAL T TAURI STAR GI TAU Zhen Guo 1;2,Gregory J. Herczeg1,Jessy Jose1,Jianning Fu3,Po-Shih Chiang4,Konstantin Grankin5,Raul´ Michel6,Ram Kesh Yadav7, Jinzhong Liu 8 Wen-ping Chen4,Gang Li3,Huifang Xue3,Hubiao Niu3;8,Annapurni Subramaniam9,Saurabh Sharma10,Nikom Prasert7, Nahiely Flores-Fajardo1;11,Angel Castro6;12,Liliana Altamirano6;12 Draft version October 11, 2018 ABSTRACT The variability of young stellar objects is mostly driven by star-disk interactions. In long-term photometric monitoring of the accreting T Tauri star GI Tau, we detect extinction events with typical depths of ∆V ∼ 2:5 mag that last for days-to-months and often appear to occur stochastically. In 2014 – 2015, extinctions that repeated with a quasi-period of 21 days over several months is the first empirical evidence of slow warps predicted from MHD simulations to form at a few stellar radii away from the central star. The reddening is consistent with RV = 3:85 ± 0:5 and, along with an absence of diffuse interstellar bands, indicates that some dust processing has occurred in the disk. The 2015 – 2016 multi-band lightcurve includes variations in spot coverage, extinction, and accretion, each of which result in different traces in color-magnitude diagrams. This lightcurve is initially dominated by a month-long extinction event and return to the unocculted brightness. The subsequent light-curve then features spot modulation with a 7.03 day period, punctuated by brief, randomly- spaced extinction events.
    [Show full text]
  • The Fixed Stars
    Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science Volume 2 Number 3 Article 10 1881 The Fixed Stars John F. Downey Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/jmas Part of the Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons Recommended Citation Downey, J. F. (1881). The Fixed Stars. Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science, Vol. 2 No.3, 146-161. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/jmas/vol2/iss3/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science by an authorized editor of University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Fxcd Stars. THE FIXED STARS. BY PROF. JOHN F. DOWNEY-OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MIN· NESOTA. The object of this paper is to give, in a popular form, a brief review of what is known about the fixed stars. Although they have always been objects of interest, have guided the mariner over trackless seas, arid have inspired many sublime and noble thoughts, yet, until a comparatively recent date, only three things were k.nown about them; viz., that they re­ tain (approximately) their ·relative positions, that they are self luminous, and that they are very far away. The remotest planet of our own system is at no insignifi­ cant distance. It is difficult for us to comprehend it when expressed in terms of any unit used in terrestial measurements.
    [Show full text]