Ori Vandewalle
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Ori Vandewalle's posts
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From the Earth to the Moon
I recently finished reading The Birth of a New Physics , by I. Bernard Cohen, which describes the 17th century transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. This reminded me of a demonstration I did for my astronomy sections last semester, in which I t...
I recently finished reading The Birth of a New Physics , by I. Bernard Cohen, which describes the 17th century transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. This reminded me of a demonstration I did for my astronomy sections last semester, in which I t...
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The Pale Blue Discourse
By sheer coincidence, xkcd recently did a comic on why the sky is blue at about the same time the astronomy class I TA got to its unit on light and optics. Credit: xkcd The Wednesday before that comic appeared, I led a discussion in which I explained why, i...
By sheer coincidence, xkcd recently did a comic on why the sky is blue at about the same time the astronomy class I TA got to its unit on light and optics. Credit: xkcd The Wednesday before that comic appeared, I led a discussion in which I explained why, i...
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Snow Line and the Dwarf's Seven
I'm really sorry about the title. Not sorry enough not to use it, of course, but a little sorry. So you may have heard about the recent discovery of a nearby solar system (a mere 39 light years away!) with seven planets all packed very close to the star (an...
I'm really sorry about the title. Not sorry enough not to use it, of course, but a little sorry. So you may have heard about the recent discovery of a nearby solar system (a mere 39 light years away!) with seven planets all packed very close to the star (an...
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When You Think Upon a Star
Among the sciences, astronomy benefits from widespread public appeal. Hilariously large numbers and gorgeous images make it an attractive source for science news. The result is that some difficult notions from astronomy have managed to penetrate successfull...
Among the sciences, astronomy benefits from widespread public appeal. Hilariously large numbers and gorgeous images make it an attractive source for science news. The result is that some difficult notions from astronomy have managed to penetrate successfull...
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Live From Low-Earth Orbit!
It looks like I disappeared again. Or maybe I was just too faint to detect above the noise of the internet. Sorry about that. To make up for my absence, this post will have a whole bunch of pictures. After all, there is a favorable exchange rate between pic...
It looks like I disappeared again. Or maybe I was just too faint to detect above the noise of the internet. Sorry about that. To make up for my absence, this post will have a whole bunch of pictures. After all, there is a favorable exchange rate between pic...
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Rungs All the Way Down
The last lab we run in Astronomy 101 has students simulate observations of distant galaxies and then do some analysis in Excel to discover Hubble's law. By the end, students come up with a rough estimate for the age of the universe. But as I remarked elsewh...
The last lab we run in Astronomy 101 has students simulate observations of distant galaxies and then do some analysis in Excel to discover Hubble's law. By the end, students come up with a rough estimate for the age of the universe. But as I remarked elsewh...
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A Heart to Heart Talk
Several billion years ago, a bright red star the size of Earth's orbit beat like a heart in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Already billions of years old, this star had long since fused all the hydrogen in its core into helium. Eventually, the star gr...
Several billion years ago, a bright red star the size of Earth's orbit beat like a heart in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Already billions of years old, this star had long since fused all the hydrogen in its core into helium. Eventually, the star gr...
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Some astronomical image processing inspired by Hubble.
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On Guessing
This is a follow-up to my Lagrange point post . At the end, I briefly mentioned the L4/L5 Lagrange points, which are stable and form equilateral triangles with the masses of a three-body system. I'd like to delve into the physics of these points a bit to il...
This is a follow-up to my Lagrange point post . At the end, I briefly mentioned the L4/L5 Lagrange points, which are stable and form equilateral triangles with the masses of a three-body system. I'd like to delve into the physics of these points a bit to il...
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