Scioly.org

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

Magikarpmaster629 wrote:

jonboyage wrote: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?

1.18 solar masses

Adi1008 wrote:

Magikarpmaster629 wrote:

jonboyage wrote: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 wrote:

Adi1008 wrote:

Magikarpmaster629 wrote: 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

Unome wrote:

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?)

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!