Lecture 5: Stellar graveyards

Further reading

• Jocelyn Bell Burnell's description of her discovery of pulsars is available on line, in the form of the transcript of an after-dinner speech she gave, at http://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/burnell.htm. There's a somewhat longer account at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118807400/PDFSTART (in PDF form)
• There's an excellent site on general relativity at "Spacetime Wrinkles" at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/NumRelHome.html. It has lots of stuff we didn't have time to discuss, including discussion about gravitational waves and how to detect them, and illustrations of how light gets bent near a black hole.
• NASA has a nice booklet for teachers about black holes: "The Anatomy of Black Holes" http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/educators/blackholes/imagine/cover.html.
• We didn't get into the question of what happens if you fall into a black hole, etc. Check out the animations at "Inside Black Holes: What really happens inside black holes?" http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/
• The story of the Sco X-1 and the start of X-ray astronomy is told at "The Story of SCO X1: Days and Rockets in the White Sands" http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_sources/sco/sco1.html

Source for images

• Gravitational waves: from "Gravitational Waves: The Big Bang's Smoking Gun", http://www.space.com/25088-gravitational-waves.html
• Optical image of Sirius: from Stars and Galaxies by Richard McCray, http://cosmos.colorado.edu/stem/courses/ASTR1120-3/documents/chapter5/lesson5.html; Chandra X-ray image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, 2000 October 6, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap001006.html
• Sizes of white dwarfs: from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf
• NGC 2440 and its white dwarf: from Astronomy Picture of the Day, 2004 January 11, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040111.html
• HR diagram: from Explorations: an Introduction to Astronomy by Thomas Arny, Fig. 12.17, http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/astronomy/arny/instructor/graphics/ch12/1217.html
• Crystallised white dwarf: from "Diamond in the Sky" by Travis Metcalfe, http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~tmetcalfe/diamond.html
• X-ray binary: from http://xraypulsars.aip.de/
• "Neutron Star" by Larry Niven: cover of edition by Ballantine Books (1989)
• Jocelyn Bell at Mullard Observatory: from http://cosmos.colorado.edu/cw2/courses/astr1120/text/chapter7/Bell.html
• Pulsar "scruff": from "A Tutorial on Radio Pulsars" by Jon Bell, http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pulsar/Education/Tutorial/tut/node3.html
• Rotating pulsar: from Pulsar beacon animation, http://www.amherst.edu/~gsgreenstein/progs/animations/pulsar_beacon/
• Crab Pulsar: from "Optical images of the Crab Pulsar" from the SEDS M1 page: http://www.seds.org./messier/more/m001_pulsar.html
• Pulsar radiation: from Astronomy 122: Birth and Death of Stars by Jim Schombert, Lecture 16: Neutron stars http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec16.html
• Aerobee rocket launch: from Space Race, http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal114/SpaceRace/sec200/sec231.htm
• First X-ray source discovered: from the original paper by Giacconi et al. 1962, "Evidence for Rontgen-rays from sources outside the solar system", Phys. Rev. Lett. 9, 439
• Optical ID of Sco X-1: from original paper by Sandage et al. 1966, "On the optical identification of Sco X-1", Ap. J. 146, 316.
• Images of the X-ray and optical sky: from Five Years of ROSAT, http://wave.xray.mpe.mpg.de/rosat/five_years/survey
• HEAO X-ray source catalogue: from Chandra resources, http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/illustrations/heaoA1.html
• Comparison of Aldebaran with the Sun: from Astronomy 122: Birth and Death of Stars by Jim Schombert http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec09.html
• Rubber sheet diagram: from "Zero Point Energy and Relativity" http://www.setterfield.org/ZPE_and_relativity/ZPE_and_Relativity.html
• Material falling around: from Flannery 1975, "The location of the hot spot in cataclysmic variable stars as determined from particle trajectories", MNRAS 170, 325
• Artist’s impression of an accretion disk: from Astronomy Picture of the Day 1999 December 19, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap991219.html
• Pulsar: from "Astronomical whirling dervishes hide their age well" http://www.astronomynow.com/090610Astronomicalwhirlingdervisheshidetheiragewell.html
• Binary pulsar: from http://astrosun.tn.cornell.edu/courses/astro201/psr1913.htm
• Black widow pulsar: from Chandra Photo Album, http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/b1957/index.html
• Animation of the formation of a millisecond pulsar: from RXTE: Snazzy Science http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/Snazzy/Movies/millisecond.html
• Double pulsar image and animations: from "First-known double pulsar opens up new astrophysics", Jodrell Bank Press Release 2004/01, http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/doublepulsar/
• Black hole image: from APOD 2014 October 26 http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141026.html
• Velocity of companion to A0620–00: from original paper by Johnston, Kulkarni and Oke 1989, ApJ 345, 492
• Supermassive black hole: painting by Don Dixon http://cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/portfolio301/pages/326-QuasarB.htm. Artwork copyright 2003 by Don Dixon/cosmographica.com, used with permission.
• Michelson interferometer: from http://blitiri.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/coherence-3-michelson-interferometer.html
• Einstein: from Fermilab Today http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive/archive_2014/today14-04-18_NutshellReadMore.html
• Spacetime curvature: painting by Mark Garlick, from "Putting Einstein to the Test" http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/01/putting-einstein-to-the-test/
• Eclipse test of GR: from "Out with a Bang": a web version of the VSU planetarium show presented in April 2001, http://www.valdosta.edu/phy/astro/pl_shows/bh_2001/bh/index.html
• Gravitational lensing in the galaxy cluster Abell 2218: from Astronomy Picture of the Day, 2001 October 7 http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011007.html
• Cluster CL0024+1654: Hubble image, from APOD 2015 August 23, http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150823.html
• "Rubber sheet" diagram: from "Spacetime Wrinkles: General Relativity" http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/GenRelativity.html
• Parallel lines: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity#/media/File:Spacetime_curvature.png
• Radius vs circumference in a warped sheet: redrawn from "Cosmic Catastrophes" by J. Craig Wheeler, Figure 9.6
• Shapiro delay: from "Astronomers Weigh "Recycled" Millisecond Pulsar", NRL Press Release 2-06r http://www.nrl.navy.mil/pressRelease.php?Y=2006&R=2-06r
• Gravity waves: from "Explorations: an Introduction to Astronomy" by Thomas Arny, Fig. 14.16 http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/astronomy/arny/instructor/graphics/ch14/1416.html
• Gravitational redshift: from "Spacetime Wrinkles: Putting Relativity to the Test" http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest.html
• Squashing a star: from "The Anatomy of Black Holes", http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/teachers/blackholes/imagine/contents.html
• Wormhole: from "How Stuff Works: How time travel will work" by Kevin Bonsor http://www.howstuffworks.com/time-travel.htm
• Binary stars: from "How To Find A Binary System's Habitable Zone" http://www.iflscience.com/space/how-find-binary-stars-habitable-zone

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Last updated 6 November 2018