Here's where you get a chance to explore an astronomical topic that we don't have time to cover in depth during class. The choice of topic is entirely up to you. We've listed a number of suggestions and pointers below, but feel free to think outside the box. Some details:
- The project accounts for 15% of your course grade. Please don't put it off until the last minute.
- For Homework 3 (due Thursday, March 2), you will read this guideline page and start thinking about possible topics for your project. You will also submit a short summary of these initial ideas. You're definitely not locked into what you submit here, though.
- For Homework 5 (due Tuesday, April 18), you will refine your initial ideas, finalize them into a brief outline, and do a bit of research. You'll submit this outline and the links to at least 3 different sources that you will use for your writing.
- The actual final projects are due on Tuesday, May 2. Late submissions will be accepted up to one week after the due-date, but will only earn up to 50% credit. There will be an assignment on Canvas that will allow you to upload a document (preferrably PDF, but other formats are okay).
TOPICS
You will focus on one specific "application" of the material covered in this course. Usually this topic will fall in the fields of astrophysics, planetary science, or solar/space physics. If you want to dig into something in a different field (say, laboratory physics, geology, cosmo-chemistry, or aerospace engineering), that's probably okay, but your instructor will have to approve the topic. It can be inspired by brand-new discoveries, or it can come from something that fascinated you in the pages of an old book. It shouldn't be something that we covered in-depth in class, though.
Below, we first give some online resources that are updated frequently to cover new discoveries in astronomy. Then we'll list a few example topics, but please don't feel constrained to choose from that list. They're just here to get you thinking...
Online resources:
- AstroBites is a blog written by astronomy graduate students (some here at CU Boulder) that highlights newly published research results.
- AAS Nova is an online digest, from the American Astronomical Society, of recently published papers.
- NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) doesn't always link to newly published papers, but it often leads to timely water-cooler discussions about current topics.
- Of course, you can always dive into the deep end: arXiv/astro--ph, the place where roughly 50 new astronomy research papers are posted every day!
Example topics:
- What are black holes? How did people first speculate about their possible existence (back in the 1700s!), and how have our observations of them improved over the years?
- It's only been less than a decade that gravitational waves have been observed with amazing facilities like LIGO. What have we learned about the universe from them?
- We now know of more than 5000 exoplanets that orbit other stars. But how do we use light from telescopes (plus math and physics!) to measure their properties? Which measurement techniques are best for small/rocky exoplanets, and which ones are best for the bigger gas giants?
- Jupiter's moon Europa probably has oceans of liquid water underneath its icy outer crust. However, there's also evidence for geologic activity that excites Europa to eject plumes of water vapor out into space. Next year, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper mission. What will they find?
- Have you heard of Planet Nine? No, not Pluto, but a hypothesized large planet, much further out, that may be perturbing the orbits of the other small bodies in our solar system's Kuiper Belt. Some scientists (including some here at CU) don't believe it really exists, but some are actively searching for it. A nice project paper would summarize the "pro" and "con" arguments fairly.
- There have been some interesting asteroid-like objects to come close to the Earth... from possible interstellar "visitors" like Oumuamua to potentially dangerous impactors like Apophis. What insights from the "two-body problem" (lecture set 2) can be brought to bear on how we forecast the trajectories of objects like these?
- In lecture set 3, we discussed various "paradoxes" of relativity, which didn't really turn out to be paradoxes at all: the twin paradox, the ladder paradox, Supplee's paradox, etc. There are others, and I'm sure there are explanations out there that are better than the ones I provided. If you come across super-insightful explanations that make more sense than mine, feel free to write about them.
- Near the end of the semester, we will examine nuclear fusion and the origin of various chemical elements in the periodic table. If you could choose just one element (say, gold) you could write an interesting paper that describes where it all comes from, ultimately...
- There are all kinds of futuristic sci-fi projects that people have proposed: say, space elevators, or floating space settlements, or even actual warp drives! You can choose to research any one of these ideas and follow up with a science-based assessment of how realistic it is.
FORMAT
The default way to prepare your project is a written essay. Your paper must convey some background (i.e., how did we come to understand the topic), motivation (i.e., why is it relevant), and some quantitative exploration of the physics (i.e., showing some relevant equations and describing how they are solved). The last part is important for making connections to the topics we have covered in class.
The length to aim for is about approximately 2000 words (about 4 to 5 pages single-spaced, or 8 to 10 pages double-spaced), not counting snazzy figures (highly recommended) and a bibliography of cited sources (required).
For more information on essay-writing and citing sources, see:
- The CU Boulder Writing Center has many resources.
- Here's a nice guide for writing college essays from the University of Edinburgh.
- For more about reference/citation styles, there's a useful guide from CU libraries. I don't care which style you choose, but once you choose one, maintaining consistency is important.
If you have even more out-of-the-box ideas, such as doing something with computational calculations, making videos or a web-page, or even interviewing a local scientist and writing it up as "journalism," that's great... but instructor approval is needed.
Just to be clear, no matter which option you choose, you still need to research and cite multiple sources (not just the lecture notes and textbooks, and definitely not just Wikipedia!) so you can get a broad, but also detailed, view of the science.
Lastly, you already know that the CU Boulder academic integrity policy needs to be obeyed at all times, and this includes plagiarism. Some other local online guides that go into more detail about what plagiarism is, and how to avoid it, include the essay-writing guide mentioned above, and many useful sites that you can find by Googling "How to Avoid Plagiarism." It's definitely not worth the risk to your academic career to go down that road.
If you have any questions about any aspect of the final project, please let me know.