A note on the Hydrogen spectrum

The emission spectrum of atomic hydrogen is given by this amazing spectral series diagram:

Let’s take a closer look at only the visible portion of the spectrum i.e the Balmer series.

If a hydrogen lamp and a diffraction grating just happen to be with you, you can take a look at the hydrogen lamp through the diffraction grating, these lines are what you would see:

Source

These are known emission lines and they occur when the hydrogen atoms in the lamp return to a state of lower energy from an excited energy state.

           Representation of emission and absorption using the Bohr’s model

Here’s another scenario that could also happen:

You have a bright source of light with a continuous spectrum and in between the source and the screen, you introduce a gas (here, sodium)

Source: Harvard Natural sciences

The gas absorbs light at particular frequencies and therefore we get dark lines in the spectrum.

This is known as absorption line. The following diagram summarizes what was told thus-far in a single image:

The absorption and emission spectrum for hydrogen look like so :

Stars and Hydrogen

One of the comments from the previous post was to show raw spectrum data of what was being presented to get a better visual aid.

Therefore,the following spectrum is a spectrum of a star taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

                                 Plot of wavelength vs median-flux

Here’s the spectrum with all the absorption lines labelled:

Source: SDSS

You can clearly see the Balmer series of hydrogen beautifully encoded in this spectrum that was taken from a star that is light-years away.

And astronomers learn to grow and love these lines and identify them immediately in any spectrum, for they give you crucial information about the nature of the star, its age, its composition and so much more.

Source: xkcd

Have a great day!

*If you squint your eyes a bit more you can find other absorption lines from other atoms embedded in the spectrum as well.

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On the strong 5577Å spectrum line

The above is a plot of the Wavelength(in Å) in the x-axis vs the flux of some objects from the Sloan digital survey ( consists of galaxies, young stars, Quasars, etc)

But  there is one strong peak in all of those plots that seems to stand out: 5577 Å

And if you like, the color that it represents is the above  (Made with Stanford’s color matcher app)

A nightmare for the astronomer

This line at 5577.338 is what astronomers refer to as a ‘skyline emission’ or a ‘mesospheric night-glow’ and arises from the recombination of atomic oxygen in the mesosphere.[2]

                                               Source

This line is of no significance to an astronomer who is looking to find out properties about a far away astronomical object. Yet, this line pops up in every spectrum of any object that you look at in outerspace!

In addition since the line is so strong, it contaminates the nearby pixels making the nearby data unusable and also messes up the scaling of the plot.

Example of contaminated pixel columns in an image because of bright object

Wavelength Calibration

What do you do with something that is always there but has no use for you? – Re-purpose it!

Having noticed that this peak was consistent at 5577.338, Astronomers decided that they would use this peak line in the data as a reference to calibrate their actual data. (known as ‘zero-point correction’).

This ensures that all the spectrum lines in the data are aligned and any errors that might have occurred during observation are corrected for.

Other lines ?

There are other lines at 6300,6363, etc which are sometimes as bright or brighter than the 5577 line that are also used for calibration.

If you are interested in learning more, the following are three papers that this post was inspired from and they dive deeper into more technical details that underlie this fascinating topic:

[1] Night-Sky High-Resolution Spectral Atlas of OH and O2 Emission Lines for Echelle Spectrograph Wavelength Calibration

[2] Mesospheric nightglow spectral survey taken by the ISO Spectral Spatial Imager on ATLAS 1

[3] Variability of the mesospheric nightglow sodium D2/D1 ratio

Have a great day!

Celestial Wonders- Binary Stars.

The twins of the stellar world are binary star systems.A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass.When two stars appear close together in the sky, the situation is known as an “optical double”. This means that although the stars are aligned along the same line of sight, they may be at completely different distances from us. This occurs in constellations; however, two stars in the same constellation can also be part of a binary system.

Artist’s impression of the sight from a (hypothetical) moon of planet HD 188753 Ab (upper left), which orbits a triple star system( yes, a Triple Star system!). The brightest companion is just below the horizon.

Binary star systems are very important in astrophysics because calculations of their orbits allow the masses of their component stars to be directly determined, which in turn allows other stellar parameters, such as radius and density, to be indirectly estimated. This also determines an empirical mass-luminosity relationship (MLR) from which the masses of single stars can be estimated.

It is estimated that approximately 1/3 of the star systems in the Milky Way are binary or multiple, with the remaining 2/3 consisting of single stars.

The Brightest star in the sky is a binary.

This is true. When it was discovered in 1844 by the German astronomer Bessel, the system was classed as an astrometric binary, because the companion star, Sirius B, was too faint to be seen. Bessel, who was also a mathematician, determined by calculations that Sirius B existed after observing that the proper of Sirius A (the main star) followed a wavy path in the sky, rather than a uniform path. Sirius can now be studied as a visual binary because, with improving technology and therefore improved telescopes, Sirius B was able to be seen, although not for 20 years after Bessel had correctly predicted its existence.

Black Holes in a binary System ?

The term “binary system” is not used exclusively for star systems, but also for planets, asteroids, and galaxies which rotate around a common center of gravity. However, this is not a trick question; even in star binaries, the companion can be a black hole. An example of this is Cygnus X-1.

The universe is pretty amazing huh?…

Why did the Earth start spinning?

Our Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a huge cloud of gas and dust started to collapse under its own gravity.

As the cloud collapsed, it started to spin. Some of the material within this cloud gathered into swirling eddies and eventually formed into planets. As the planets formed, they kept this spinning motion. This is similar to what you see when skaters pull in their arms and spin faster. As material gathered in more closely to form a planet, like Earth, the material spun faster.

Why does the Earth still Spin?

To put it bluntly, the earth is still spinning because there are no forces acting to make it stop spinning! This is known as Inertia – an inherent law of nature.

Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain in motion unless and until acted upon by an unbalanced force.

( Source : http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/59-Why-does-Earth-spin-)

How do we know how far away is the moon?

Textbooks reluctantly write it as 384,400 km on average. But How on earth did they figure out how far the moon was? Here is an interesting way:

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment.

The ongoing Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment measures the distance between the Earth and the Moon using laser ranging.

Lasers on Earth are aimed at retro-reflectors ( device or surface that reflects light back to its source with a minimum of scattering.) planted on the Moon during the Apollo program (11, 14, and 15), and the time for the reflected light to return is determined.

The distance to the Moon is calculated approximately using this equation:

Distance = (Speed of light × Time taken for light to reflect) / 2.

(since distance=speed* time )

The reflected light is too weak to be seen with the human eye: out of 10¹⁷ photons aimed at the reflector, only one will be received back on Earth every few seconds, even under good conditions. They can be identified as originating from the laser because the laser is highly monochromatic.

There you have it! The distance between the moon and the earth, and also conclusive proof that astronauts did land on the moon. 

Can you test this in your backyard ? Unfortunately no ! You would need highly sensitive detectors and a laser that can shoot 10¹⁷ green 532 nm photons per pulse. Not to mention the fancy electronics ! Phew !

( Extra : Lunar laser ranging The Big Bang Theory style. 

Mythbusters try the lunar ranging experiment. ( for real ) )