Christopher B. Siren

Astrophysics, Space Science, Planetary Science, and Cosmology

Ancient Astronomy

• The Babylonians have left us the earliest written records of astronomy. A map illustrating their view of the world and heavens, including their zodiac can be found in this Monograph from the British Library
• To their east, the ancestors of the Indians were developing their study of the stars and planets as well. The Antiquity and Astronomy of the Vedic Culture page covers their enterprises. (Broken Link 8/24)
• After the Babylonians and Egyptians, the early Greeks wrestled with problems of astronomy and cosmology.
• In the Americas, Mayan Astronomy reached its heights independent of the cultures on the other side of the Atlantic.
• For further information, Wolfgang Dick maintains an extensive set of links related to The History of Astronomy (Broken Link 8/24)
• Between Ptolomey and Copernicus, much of the advances in astronomy were made by Muslim Mathemeticians, Astronomers, and Scientists.

Megasites from NASA and associates

• The Voyager missions by JPL and NASA began to pique my interest in planetary science and astronomy when I was still in elementary school. JPL's site contains a number of pages on the various planets as seen through missions in which they've been involved.
• Another gateways to NASA are the Ames Research Center Public Affairs Page in California and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The Solar System

• The SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) site has an extensive tour of The Nine Planets
• Calvin J. Hamilton's Views of the Solar System is another good collection of images and information.

  Sun

  • The SOHO spacecraft provides a report of Solar Weather conditions which includes several views the sun over a number of different sets of wavelengths.
  • The Sun Today: SHINE Directory to the Latest Solar Images and Interplanetary Data.
  • Big Bear Solar Observatory at Big Bear Lake, CA provides a number of current images of the Sun in a number of wavelengths, as well as magnetograms.

  Venus

  • As an undergrad, I did one of my theses on Venusian volcanoes, using data collected by Magellan.
  • Also check out the Magellan Image Sever from MIT's Center for Space Research.
  • and NASA's Magellan Mission to Venus page.
  • Glen Newton and Paul Budkewitsch present F.O.V. Face of Venus includes descriptions of the types of features found on Venus as well as searchable databases about Venusian craters and coronae.

  Earth's Moon

  • Lunar Prospector was launched in January of 1998. This spacecraft finished its mission in July 1999, by crashing into a lunar crater near the south pole in an attempt to see if there is any water there.
  • In 1996, Clementine also visited the moon and found evidence of ice in a polar crater.
  • Eric M. Jones has assembled a Apollo Lunar Surface Journal documenting the surface portions of the manned missions to the moon from 1969 to 1972. Included are the transcripts between the astronauts and Houston, numerous images, and commentary on what was done and why.
  • In the practice of science it is good to remain skeptical of assertions made by others until one sees if those assertions are backed up by solid justifications and proof. Some folks have taken the skeptical portion of this attitude with regard to the Apollo Moon landings, but haven't really examined the proof that astronauts did indeed land on the Moon. Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine looks at the reasons why folks might think the lunar landings were faked and counters those arguments in this "Moon Hoax"- debunk article.

  Mars

  • Set to launch in 2003, ESA's Mars Express will put the Beagle2 lander on the planet.
  • Jim Bell has some interesting pages on Mars and NEAR
  • Woohoo! Mars Pathfinder landed on that planet on July 4th, 1997.
  • Because of the high load expected around the landing date, JPL has let SGI put up this Pathfinder Mirror site
  • The Mars Global Surveyor arrived in September of 1997 and began mapping that planet in March of 1998.
  • The geological features in the Cydonia Region are quite interesting and include what has been called the "face on Mars". The above web page presents the raw and processed images of that region from Mars Global Surveyor.
  • This page on the Face on Mars by Malin Space Science Systems presents some of the same images in a clearer format than above.
  • In early August, 1996 a team of NASA and Stanford scientists held a news conference about their findings from an asteroid centering around the possibility that there was once life on Mars. JPL's mirror site, Ames's mirror site Johnson Space Center's mirror site
  • Transcripts of that news conference and other life on Mars related links can be found at the Federation of American Scientists site.
  • In the 1970's the Viking spacecraft orbited and landed on Mars. You can use these Mars Atlases and image finders to search the images obtained from Mars orbit.

  Jupiter

  • In August of 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter.
  • Speaking of Jupiter, Galileo has now arrived there. It also launched a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere on December 7th 1996 and has been flying by the Galilean moons.
  • Also concerning Galileo is this NASA K-12 Jupiter page
  • Another NASA K-12 project is Kidsat/Project Yes

  Saturn

  • As Galileo is to Jupiter, Cassini is to Saturn. Launched in late 1997, Cassini is due to arrive at Saturn in 2003 and will drop a probe into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

  Pluto

  • Prof. Fran Bagenal maintains The Pluto Home Page

  Asteroids

  • NEAR - Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous flew past 253 Mathilda and snapped some cool pictures then orbited and later landed on the asteroid Eros.
  • The Planetary Data System, Small Body Node provides information, including ephemeris data, about Asteroids and Comets.
  • Dr. David Williams maintains the NSSDC Asteroid Home Page.
  • David Jewitt maintains an informative page on the Kuiper Belt a collection of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
  • Douglas Hamilton presents a page on Solar System Collisions which includes an applet which lets you input data on how fast, how large and what composition your impacting body will be and then shows you the results with images from actual craters and some artistic renditions.

  Comets

  • The Comet Observation Home Page maintains information on currently visable comets as well as having old comet images.
  • In the Summer of 2000, Comet Linear made its closest approach to the sun and began to break apart!
  • Russel Sipe has assembled a site on Comet Hale-Bopp - which wowed us in March, April, and May of 1997.
  • In March of 1996, Comet C/1966 B2 (Hyakutake) was a brilliant show. Quite visible to the naked eye, it passed within one tenth of an AU of the Earth.
  • Charles Kowal discovered the icy body Chiron in 1977, but it wasn't until 1988 that a cometary tail was observed, confirming that it was a comet and not an asteroid.
  • Cometary Magnitude Analyzer

  Offline

  • The New Solar System, ed. Beatty, J. Kelly and Chaikin, Andrew, Sky Publishing Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990 (There is also a more recent edition). This wonderful book collects articles on the Sun, the planets, comets, asteroids and other features of our solar system written by top planetary scientists. Still, the technical jargon is minimal and kept at a Discover magazine level. It also contains several beautiful photos and color charts which help illustrate the concepts within. I first used this in an introductory level planetary science course at MIT, but it would be a good resource for high school students writing a term paper in earth science or astronomy.

Beyond the Solar System

• Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnel at Goddard Space Flight Center present the Astronomy Picture of the Day, along with archives of past pictures. The archives are organized by topic and each picture's page has an informative caption.
• Check out the Latest from the Hubble Space Telescope, or visit their library of Pictures.
• The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile is the largest optical array of telescopes right now (four 8.2 m mirrors acting in concert as a 16 m telescope).
• The High Engergy Astrophysics Science Archive Reasearch Center (HEASARC) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) details their numerous missions & spacecraft, and presents an informative outreach section.
• VSOP the Very long baseline interferometry Space Observing Program includes an 8m radio dish in a highly eliptical orbit with a 21,000km apogee in addition to sites on the ground.
• The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) looks for deuterium (heavy hydrogen) as a means of tracing the evolution of galaxies & the universe.
• CHANDRA, like the HST is one of the Great Observatories in orbit about the earth. Whereas Hubble looks mainly in the visible region of the spectrum, Chandra looks in the higher energy, X-ray region of the spectrum.
• Another of the great observatories has had a lot of use back at UNH. The Gamma-Ray Observatory's (GRO) Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) looked at the spectrum of light at energies even higher than Chandra. A large part of its mission is oriented around studying the enigmatic gamma-ray bursts. The GRO was de-orbited and crashed into the Earth in June 2000.
• ESA's successor gamma-ray telescope is INTEGRAL>
• The satellite Hipparcos has used the method of parallax to determine the position of, distance to, and proper motion of thousands of nearby stars with the greatest accuracy to date.
• One cool thing about the Hipparchos results is that they help resolve the Globular Cluster Age problem - the old distance calculations to Cephid variables made Globular's seem closer and therefore older than we now find them to be. They were thought to be older than the Hubble law prediction for the age of the universe, but this conflict is not mostly resolved.
• There have been an awful lot of planets found around other stars lately so JPL has established the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems homepage.
• Info on the nearby extra-solar planet discovered in June 1998 can be found here and here
• The Electronic Universe project includes a page on the planet discovered in orbit around 51 Pegasus. The physics on this page is algebra based with a bit of statistics when discussing whether or not the planet could maintain its atmosphere.
• Because of the low sensitivity of our current instruments, the extra-solar planets we have found thus far tend to be very close to their parent stars and very massive, thus earning them the nickname Hot Jupiters in this Scientific American article and elsewhere.
• University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Obsevatory has a nice article on Neutron Stars
• John Kolena collects a number of links to information about Black Holes on the Internet
• Sky Publishing, publishers of Sky and Telescope put out weekly news releases inluding highlights of the sky this week.
• Astronomy Magazine another major amateur astronomy magazine.
• The Space Access Society
• Nick Strobel's Astronomy Notes present a lengthy introduction to the subject as an online version of his book of the same name.
• Gary Agranat presents Astronomy Homework Help on a variety of subtopics, including a collection of links geared particularly "for young minds".
• Jonathan McDowell's Space Page contains links to a number of sites including his weekly Space Reports.
• Stephen Hawking's Universe was an excellent mini-series on PBS a few years back featuring a number of astrophysicists and physicists. The companion website has a number of articles on a wide variety of astronomy and physics related topics.
• Sometimes the information we see about astronomy is just bad. Sometimes the entertainment industry skimps on the science for the sake of story and viewers buy into it, sometimes news crews make mistakes, sometimes it's a long standing popular tradition. When Bad Astronomy strikes, Phil Plait tries to correct it on this informative and entertaining site.
• As an undergrad, I took an observational astronomy seminar run by Steve Slivan. He's got a nice collection of images of Messier Objects taken from the 24" telescope at MIT's Wallace Observatory.
• The Amateur Astronomy Observers' Log has more images of a wide array of objects.
• For subscribers, there is net access to The Astrophysical Journal
• There are a lot of Astronomy Sites on the Internet and the web.
• Much of the research at UNH's physics department centers on astrophysics and space physics.
• Then, there is the astronomical Data Center of Strasbourg.
• Is anybody out there? The folks at SETIquest and SETI League Inc. are trying to find out.
• sci.space.news (moderated)
• sci.astro (Beware the high volume)

Cosmology

• What can we determine about how the universe formed and how it is structured? How do we figure this out? Ned Wright maintains a very useful collection of Frequently Asked Questions in Cosmology
• John Hawley and Katherine Holcomb provide web support for their text Foundations of Modern Cosomology including summaries of the contents and relevant links.
• In 1980, Alan Guth introduced the Cosmic Inflation theory, a refinement of the Big Bang theory. Guth introduces this theory in an article originally for "The Beamline" in Was Cosmic Inflation the 'Bang' of the Big Bang?
• Andre Linde has helped modify and expand Guth's original theory and on his home page describes the "Self Reproducing Inflationary Universe".
• John Gribbin author of several popular science books, presents Inflation for Beginners
• When Albert Einstein first described General Relativity in 1915, he included a cosmological constant which kept the universe in his theory from collapsing in on itself. Later observational evidence showed that the universe was expanding as if from some initial explosion and not holding some steady state as Einstein had assumed. This made the cosmological constant unnecessary and Einstein considered it "his greatest blunder". However, recent observational evidence suggests that the universe may be expanding more rapidly than gravitational attraction should allow. This has led many to suggest we may need to re-introduce the cosmological constant and explain this repulsion that occurs over very large scales as a consequence of vacuum energy a.k.a. "dark energy".
• This article from Science Beat describes how SNAP, the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe might be used to find evidence of such dark energy.
• Paul Preuss reports on dark energy as originally described by Bahcall, Bahcall, Ostriker and Steinhardt in a 1999 article from Science magazine.
• Scott Watson collected a number of Inflationary Cosmology Links over the course of working on an undergraduate thesis on that topic.
• Offline
  • Guth, Alan The Inflationary Universe Perseus Books, Reading, MA, 1997. Popular science book at approximately Scientific American level. Here Guth describes the nature of Inflation theory as well as the history of its development.

Astronomy Education

• The World Lecture Hall provides links to online course material for Astronomy.
• Project CLEA: Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy, develops intro Astronomy labs for the high-school and college level, using modern digital techniques & computer software.
• NASA Spacelink is a collection of NASA's educational and intstructional material.
• Solar System Educators Project from NASA for K-12 educators.

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See my Physics Links

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Last modified: September 30th, 2001

Christopher B. Siren