Browsing by Subject "Planets"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Chemical abundances of Giant Planet Host Stars
(2014-12) Brugamyer, Erik John; Sneden, Christopher; Dodson-Robinson, Sarah E.
The positive correlation between planet detection rate and host star iron abundance lends strong support to the core accretion theory of planet formation. However, iron is not the most significant mass contributor to the cores of giant planets. Since giant planet cores are thought to grow from silicate grains with icy mantles, the likelihood of gas giant formation should depend heavily on the oxygen and silicon abundance of the planet formation environment. Here we compare the silicon and oxygen abundances of a set of 76 planet hosts and a control sample of 80 metal-rich stars without any known giant planets. Our new, independent analysis was conducted using high resolution, high signal-to-noise data obtained at McDonald Observatory. Because we do not wish to simply reproduce the known planet-metallicity correlation, we have devised a statistical method for matching the underlying [Fe/H] distributions of our two sets of stars. We find a 99\% probability that planet detection rate depends on the silicon abundance of the host star, over and above the observed planet-metallicity correlation. We do not detect any such correlation for oxygen. Our results would thus seem to suggest that grain nucleation, rather than subsequent icy mantle growth, is the important limiting factor in forming giant planets via core accretion. Based on our results and interpretation, we predict that planet detection should correlate with host star abundance for refractory elements responsible for grain nucleation and that no such trends should exist for the most abundant volatile elements responsible for icy mantle growth.
A Musical Portrait of Triton, the Rogue Moon of Neptune
(2019-12) Ali, Austin; Dell'Antonio, Andrew
This thesis explores the worlds of astronomy and music telling the tale of Triton, the once dwarf-planet-turned-moon. The central creative work, Triton, the Rogue, a seven-minute musical composition for wind ensemble, follows Triton's journey translating scientific facts into a musical narrative. The accompanying thesis treatise details the science behind Triton's story and explains the musical decisions made to faithfully portray Triton in a piece of instrumental music.
A photometric search for transiting planets
(2005) Baliber, Nairn Reese; Cochran, William D.; Robinson, Edward L.
StarMapper : an android-based application to map celestial objects
(2013-12) O'Donnell, John Jason; Aziz, Adnan
This report describes StarMapper, a mobile appliation designed for the Android platform that interactively maps the celestial sky and can provide information from Wikipedia about celestial objects to the user. The stars, constellations, planets, sun, and moon are all rendered in real-time and the user can navigate the celestial map simply by pointing the device around the sky to find and identify the different celestial objects. However, if the user prefers, a manual touch-based map navigation feature is also available in StarMapper. While other Android applications currently exist for mapping the sky, such as Google's Sky Map, StarMapper aims to enhance the experience by also providing additional information about celestial objects to the user by means of a simple click on the screen. For obtaining more information about a particular constellation or other celestial object, the user only needs to click on the object's name in the map, and the device's web browser opens to the Wikipedia page of the clicked object. Through this simple mechanism, the user can learn much more about astronomy than just locations of celestial objects.