See the syllabus for more details about the two different options for the paper/project. For the paper, the focus should be more about motivations for studying the topic, derivations of key equations, and/or discussions of observational advances. For the project, you can take the equations and observational data as given, and spend your time working with them (e.g., solving equations or processing data).
The following topics are just suggestions. Please feel free to choose something else. Other ideas are spread throughout the books and lecture notes linked on the course web page.
- Polytropes and the Lane-Emden equation
- The Virial Theorem and its extensions beyond what we derived in class
- The Solar Oxygen "Crisis"
- Photospheres: how can measurements of "limb darkening" be used to constrain the depth dependence of temperature?
- The Faint Young Sun Problem
- Sunspots: statistics, lifetimes, and magnetic diffusivity. See records going back to the 1700s
- Zeeman splitting in the photosphere: what does it tell us about the Sun's magnetic field?
- Coronal loops: How good is the venerable RTV 1978 model?
- Coronal heating: what can we learn from filter-band images taken at EUV and X-ray wavelengths?
- Total eclipses: what does the visible-light emission seen "above the limb" during an eclipse tell us about the electron density of the corona?
- Parker's solar wind: can we go beyond the simple isothermal model derived in class?
- Solar wind turbulence: what information is contained in spacecraft plasma/field data taken at 1 AU, and how would Fourier transforms help us understand it?
BACK to main ASTR-3760 page.