4 posts on astronomy. All posts · RSS feed
The following code illustrates the effect of the initial velocity on the dynamics of an object released in a gravitational field. A very simple numerical integration of the equation of motion gives the trajectory, which is plotted below for four different initial speeds for a …
In astronomy, a fireball is a meteor bright enough to be seen over a wide area (either apparent magnitude greater than -4 or greater than -3 at zenith, depending on the definition used). The terms bolide and, for exceptionally bright meteors, superbolide are also used. …
The website exoplanets.org hosts a repository of data on over 5000 exoplanets discovered by various missions and techniques. For this post, I have extracted data on the mass and orbital period of 2951 exoplanets: exoplanet-data-160824.csv. The planetary masses are expressed relative to the mass of …
If you join the positions of Earth and Venus with a straight line and follow them as they orbit the sun, you get a nice picture that has been popular on Facebook. Here's the Python code for generating a similar diagram. The figure has the …
