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The magnetic field of the star is measured by observing its plasma emissions? Or its effect on surrounding gases? It sounds really fascinating, how does that w
by bloopernova 3y ago
The magnetic field of the star is measured by observing its plasma emissions? Or its effect on surrounding gases?
It sounds really fascinating, how does that work? In pictures you see a star only taking up a couple of pixels, so how much detail do you need to measure magnetic fields? Is that all done in radio astronomy?
Sorry for the machine gun questions but it's really interesting!
- aragilar 3y agoFrom the paper (https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2313/eso2313a.pdf https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/e...), they're using Zeeman splitting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeeman_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeeman_effect) of specific Oxygen lines. They're using a spectropolarimeter to measure polarization (which is hard in the visible) and get out a spectra (and other spectrographs at other telescopes as well). Almost all stars are point sources to us (i.e. they don't have a size), so you don't generally use a single image to get details. Instead you look at various wavelengths, though the use and combination of various optical devices (this is a whole massive field of research and engineering). Radio astronomy looks at different wavelengths to optical astronomy, and because of atomic and molecular physics, you get different information. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, go down to your local (university) library and see if you can borrow an undergrad introduction to astronomy (generally these will avoid most of the maths needed to actually do any work in the area, but cover enough of the concepts to be able to orient yourself in being able to look up stuff on wikipedia).
- bloopernova 3y agoThank you for a very informative and understandable response! I appreciate you :)