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News
and highlights – Winter 2014
August
1, 2014: The
Perseid
Meteor Shower of
mid-August is perhaps the most reliable annual display of
shooting stars. Pay attention to the skies of the NNE in the
hours before dawn of August 11, 12 and 13.
We
still don't have a date and time for the Deferred/Supplemental
examination. Pay attention to the McGill
Examination webpage.
July
15, 2014: If
you are still paying attention to the course site, here is a
nice video that shows the relative sizes of the
10 largest stars so-far discovered .
June
16, 2014: There
is a lot of current news about new developments in our
understanding of the formation of our Moon. Again, here is a
rather nice article about the “The
Big Splash” model
of formation.
May
6, 2014: I
have now searched through the exams looking for grading errors
or Scantron errors and found some. I have corrected what was
found to be in error. I am now in the process of forming/curving
grades to obtain letter grades. Those who did term work, either
quizzes or papers, will have your exam formed as 70% raw exam +
30% term work grade. Those of you who chose to write the exam
for 100% of your grade will find your exam grade scaled up
somewhat to compensate for the very low grading on this
particular exam. The exam-only group is scaled up so as to come
to the same average as the exam+term work grade group. If this
scaling would have taken anyone in the exam+term work group to a
better grade than that calculated by the 70%+30% formula, you
will receive the better grade. You, however, will not double
benefit from exam up-scaling before the 70%+30% calculation.
Most of you will receive very generous curving advantages. I
don't want failures any more than do you. I don't know if I can
pass everyone; there will have to be some D grades. I shall also
list, for your private information, your ranking in the class of
357 who have completed the course with this exam. At about
170/357, you might expect a B+ grade. The traditional scaling
formula didn't work out this year probably because the exam
results were so poor. Perhaps, my expectations were too high.
Still, I expect that the students were as bright as in other
years and so I have provided very generous letter grades in
scaling the course letter-grade distribution to be equivalent to
other years.
A first pass on
the letter grading is posted on myCourses.
May
5, 2014: Exams
have been graded and while I don't have either the exams
themselves or your Scantron sheets on hand yet, I am in the
process of posting exam grades as they accumulate. Tomorrow, I
shall merge the term-work grades and scale/curve the totals. The
performance on this year's exam is very disappointing in that
the exam was made shorter (and, I thought, much easier) than the
exams of previous years. Still, the raw exam average grade was
terrible, only about 44%, a full 10% lower than last year. What
accounted for this, I can't know but my suspicion is that class
attendance was very low and I expect that most of those who were
not attending class just didn't watch the online videos of the
course lectures. In the end, almost no one will fail the course
– well, perhaps 4 or 5 of the class but then they will
surely be failing most of their other courses too – but
few of you will be receiving very flattering grades.
As a rough
guide... If you did well on quizzes and term-work and received a
grade of 50% or better on the exam, you should expect at least a
B or B+ grade. If you got 55%+ on the exam and did no term-work,
you will probably get a B or B+ grade. Those of you who sit at
60%+ on the exam with some term-work should expect A- or A
grades. Look at the statistics (pull down memu from the column
header) to see where you fit in the class. Wait for the results
before worrying about your course grade. We have a reputation
for being overly generous.
April
28, 2014: This
is not material for the exam... but WISE
J085510.83-071442.5,
our newfound neighbor is now the record-holder for the coldest
brown dwarf.
Final
exam, April 29: EPSC
180 001 The
Terrestrial Planets Apr
29 2 pm Jensen
Aaa
-
Zzz
GYM FIELD
HOUSE
April
17, 2014: On
April 17 between 3:00PM and 6:30PM, I am offering a Q&A
session in Room 348 of the Frank Dawson Adams Building. I shall
answer any and all questions you may want to ask me but I won't
choose between Multiple-choice questions or give you direct
True-False answers. Ask a real question that might require some
explanation.
April
10, 2014: I
have the term papers, now graded, for return. There may still be
some grade adjustment when the quiz grades are finally tallied.
Next
Tuesday morning, starting at about 1:30AM, the Earth's shadow
will begin covering the Moon. If you are doing an “all
nighter” studying for some exam, take the time to step
outside to look at the Moon. The eclipse will be over by about
6:00AM. If it is cloudy and the Moon is hidden, you might be
able to pick up the spectacle online
here.
April
8, 2014: As
promised, I am posting a Preview
of
the final exam. The questions asked in this preview are actual
questions from the upcoming (April 29, 2:00PM) final exam.
I
shall return your term papers next day. They are now graded with
temporary grades that will be converted into actual number
grades when we balance them against the best-three quiz grades.
This cannot be done until Quiz
#5-review is
completed on April 29. Do this quiz even if you do not want to
count quiz grades and pay some attention to the Prefinal
Practice Quiz.
April
7, 2014: I
haven't much discussed the risk of asteroid impacts with Earth
this year. You might look to the Google Book by Gehrels on
Hazards...
Look to the chapter by Morrison et al., entitled The
Impact Hazard (pages
59ff.). You might find the CBC-DocZone documentary Mission
Asteroid interesting
and informative....
April
3, 2014: The
past 10 days have seen notable earthquake activity. Several
earthquakes have rattled the Los Angeles area resulting in some
damage, the major event: M5.1
- 1km S of La Habra, California Aftershocks
have been rattling the area since last weekend. A major, Mw ~
8.2 event struck along the Chile-Peru trench on Tuesday past: Mw
8.2 - 95km NW of Iquique, Chile This
event was preceded by a foreshock of Mw
6.7 two
weeks earlier and followed by a still-continuing series of
aftershocks, the largest of which Mw
7.6 - 19km S of Iquique, Chile earlier
today. The major event generated a 2-metre tsunami that washed
the coast of northern Chile.
March
27, 2014: A
new dwarf planet has been discovered at about twice the distance
from the Sun as is Pluto: 2012
VP113
March
25, 2014: I
have no news items today except to remind you that the 4th
quiz
will be held tomorrow. Term papers are being graded by Louma and
myself. They should be returned to you, but without final
numerical grade out of 30, before the end of the term. Grades
for the term papers will be adjusted so as to balance with the
quiz grades to your advantage but that cannot be done until all
the quizzes have been completed.
March
20, 2014: Welcome
to spring.
I have no other news, today, except to implore you to hand in
your term papers at the end of class if you are following that
option. In giving you a short grace period, I accept that you
drop it off in my Departmental mailbox in Room 238, FDAdams
building and if you do so, by tomorrow evening, I shall not
count your paper as being late.
March
17, 2014: Gravitational
waves have been detected: “... this is huge!.”
Gravitational
Waves from Big Bang Detected Another
link: Gravitational
Waves Detected???
What
is a gravitational wave – a time varying distortion of
space itself: Wave
nature of Gwave,
Generation
in collision of white dwarf stars ,
Close
orbiting large masses
March
13, 2014:
As
on all Thursdays (one to go) following a quiz, I shall start
today's class with the results and answers for yesterday's quiz.
Yamato
000593,
another Mars' meteorite that might show signs of fossil life.
March
10, 2014: There
has been some confusion about the dates of the next two quizzes.
Look to the “Course
overview” page
link above for the correct dates: March 12 and March 26.
It
seems that no major
holy days conflict
with the quizzes or the final exam: EPSC
180 001 The
Terrestrial Planets Apr
29 2 pm
March
8, 2014: For
those of you who are planning to do a term paper for grade, note
that papers are due in less than two weeks. On today's Quirks
and Quarks program
on CBC, Rene Heller argued that we might change our focus in
looking for Super-habitable
Planets about
other stars. This would be a good topic to develop for a paper.
Q&Q
is
a good source for ideas for topics for papers. Look into it!
February
27, 2014: Tomorrow
afternoon, at 3:30PM, my Department is hosting Jon
Wade from
Oxford who will be speaking on the formation of Earth's moon.
This topic remains under debate: I have described the “Big
Whack” model
in class but there is an alternative fission
model;
recall also our
earliest zircon .
The lecture will be held in the Redpath Museum. If you are
writing a paper for term-work grade, this might be an excellent
opportunity to choose your topic.
For
those who are interested, I shall be there at 3:00PM to take any
students who might be interested to the Dawson Auditorium on the
second floor to look at some of the geology and paleontology
exhibits. Please e-mail
me if you would like to attend this half-hour “field
trip”.
February
25, 2014: I
shall pick up on the Terra Firma documentary this afternoon. As
for interesting news: Sun
Unleashes a Monster Solar Flare;
we might look to SOHO-Lascom
for
images. Solar eruptions that disturb our Earth's magnetic field
produce aurorae. This eruption would not seem to be directed
toward Earth and so might not have much effect. Still, you might
watch the new service called OVATION
Aurora for
display forecasts. The Sun is now quite active and we might
expect to see some auroral displays in the next days of weeks.
February
20, 2014: Following
the review of yesterday's quiz, I shall show a video, now 10
years old but still relevant, that brings us to the history of
the exploration of the planets of our Solar System. It may be
available here: BBC-Horizon
documentary --- Terra Firma This
documentary covers, perhaps, 2/3 of the questions on the planets
and moons of the solar system that I might choose to ask you on
the final exam.
For
news, ESA is planning to launch a very elaborate satellite in
the search for extra-terrestrial planets: Plato
Mission
February
13, 2014: In
a paper just published in Nature on Solar
System Evolution...,
DeMeo
and Carry argue
for a much more chaotic evolution of the planetary system than I
have argued in class. Planets may well not have evolved anywhere
near their current orbital radii. For example, Jupiter is argued
to have condensed at the orbital distance of Mars, inside the
current asteroid belt and then to have been “thrown out”
to its current and nearly stable orbital distance subsequently.
Orbital interaction among the many bodies in our Solar System is
not amenable to analytical mathematical methods. We are forced
into numerical modellings with their attendant inaccuracies in
determining long-term orbital evolution.
If
you are not connected to Nature via McGill Library's online
services, you might look to the article here.
For copyright reasons, this article will be purged following
today's class.
The
next quiz, February 19th,
will concentrate on materials covered from the lecture of
February 4 forward. However, those major issues covered earlier
in the course should not be forgotten; it may be well to review
the quiz results that were presented at the beginning of the
February 6th
class
(online).
February
11, 2014: The
European Space Agency's (ESA)
new space probe Gaia,
charged with mapping the postions and motions of 1 billion stars
in our own galaxy, has obtained its first image..
February
6, 2014: For
those of you who felt that the quiz was too difficult and that
you didn't get a grade that corresponded to your effort and
work, I offer a makeup question. I'm not sure that this process
will work but let's try it. For those whose grade was below
21/30 (a small group), the answer will be worth 1 additional
mark. Anyone who obtained 22 or more really needs no help. We
are doing this for a small group of students as a test! We may
do it again.
Using
the 140 character limit on Twitter
(You
will need your own Twitter account and be sure to identify
yourself by family name in your 140 character answer), describe
the characteristics of at least two stars in the constellation
Orion. Submit your answer with hashtag #orionepsc180
and
we should be able to find it.
February
4, 2014: Because
the answers to the quizzes are revealed in class on the Thursday
following each quiz, we cannot and do not offer “re-dos”,
even for computer connection problems after noon on the
following Thursday. Note that in asking for a “re-do”,
you will need a very convincing excuse – not the standard
grandmother's funeral. There are 5 counting quizzes, so you have
every opportunity to do three for count. Also, if the quizzes
are difficult for you to access, you might consider writing the
term paper for the term-work grade.
Now,
if you have time in your busy term and might like to support
LOVE (Leave Out Violence Montreal), a dance show called Addicted
to Love is
being presented this weekend as a fund raiser.
February
2, 2014: Many
students in this class hold to traditional religious and
cultural views of the Universe and its creation, evolution,
condition and even its purpose.
Still, except for the most solipsistic among us, there is no
question that the Universe is.
Brian Green's new book Reimagining the Cosmos leads you to the
understanding of the physicist. He was interviewed this morning
on the NPR program “On
Being” with
Krista Tippett. You might find some comfort in your own
understanding in listening to the interview: Reimagining
the Cosmos.
January
30, 2014: On
OSD accommodations: properly, students seeking OSD
accommodations for the quizzes should ask the office to send me
an e-mail confirming your need. Registered OSD students are
given a 50% time supplement for the quizzes – register!
Today,
I shall discuss how it is that we serve the quizzes. The quizzes
should appear automatically on the myCourses
website
for this course. They do not appear on my websites. The first
opens at 9:00AM, Wednesday, February 5 and closes 1 minute
before midnight on that day. We will review the answers to quiz
at the beginning of the lecture on Thursday, February 6. That
means that there is no opportunity for a “take-over”
if you miss that quiz or have some computer glitch. You should
try the Practice Quiz a few times to familiarize yourself with
the quiz process. There is no need to worry about the first
quiz; you are given two attempts on this one (only) and the
better grade will be registered.
January
28, 2014: One
of your class colleagues, J-R and thank you, alerted me to this
story: Nearby
supernova dazzles astronomers Astronomers,
like seismologists and climatologists and epidemiologists and
planetary scientists have their extreme disaster scenarios...
theirs: a supernoval explosion within 100 light years of Earth
could extinct surface life on the planet. Luckily, this one is
12 million light years away.
January
22, 2014: As
we are now about to discuss stars and their classification, it
would be well to learn how to find your way around the skies
using John Walker's “Your
Sky” or
perhaps one of the tools that come with textbooks in astronomy.
You might also look to Celestia,
an open source program that is very rich in features and
available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. If you are
running Linux, you may find that you already have another
excellent celestial navigator, Kstars
on
your system.
January
21, 2014: Over
the past two or three days, ESA (European Space Agency) has been
working to “wake up” Rosetta
for
its attempt to land on Comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Rosetta's mission success would provide “the
key to unlocking the history and evolution of our Solar System,
as well as answering questions regarding the origin of Earth’s
water and perhaps even life.”...
quote from mission statement.
January
16, 2014: Not
all that might fall onto the surface of the Earth comes from
deep space. We have launched may rather large objects into
near-Earth orbits that will fall to Earth someday. One of theose
is the ISS (International Space Station). This is the largest of
all man-made orbiting satellites. It can be seen from Montreal
during short periods over the next few days. You might try to
catch
a glimpse.
The space station is in a low and decaying orbit. Every now and
then, it is pushed back into a higher orbit when supply ships
meet with it. Left alone, it has a lifetime of only a few more
years.
As
we prepare to learn something of stars and their role in
creating the rich chemistry from which our Earth formed, it
might be interesting to pay some attention to this online
resource: The
Milky Way.
Actually, one galaxy, as large as our own, is visible to the
naked eye as a diffuse cloud with an area about ½ the
image-size of our Moon: Andromeda.
You might search for it using John Walker's “Your
Sky” to
navigate the heavens.
January
14, 2014: I
shall often refer you to the NEOP
(Near
Earth Objects Program) site which is mandated to monitor objects
that might impact Earth. Very few asteroids, and recently none
large, have impacted Earth in the last few years. A small one
did on January 1: 2014AA
The
only object of real concern, at present, is 2007
VK184 which
may (about 1 chance in 1800) hit the Earth in one of four
possible impacts between 2048 and 2057.
January
8, 2014: The
online video recordings of the course lectures are available
here: http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?CourseID=9586
or
via the myCourses website.
January
6, 2014: Lectures
start tomorrow, 2:35PM in Leacock 132.
While
I don't promise to follow Twitter
for
the course, I suggest that public twitter posts and feeds use
the hashtag #epsc180
.
I
promise to avoid other tweets relating to the course so leaving
you and your complaints anonymous. If you want me to see a
complaint use the hashtag noted.
Archive:
News and highlights – Winter 2013
August
18, 2013: Five
students are scheduled for the Deferred Examination. It is
offered as follows: EPSC
180 L 001
The Terrestrial Planets ENGTR 1080 Aug 21 9 am
May
7, 2013-update: One
of your colleagues discovered an error in the compilation of the
3 best quizzes for Term Work. I have spent the last 3 hours
redoing the calculations. This was a very early part of the
calculations and so it took some time. Now, several of you will
find your grades improved by a step or two. Unfortunately, some
errors had advantaged two or three students were corrected as
well and their grades have been updated too. I have to upload
the grades to Minerva. If you know that you have found an error
in the calculations, you can let me know. If you are just hoping
that some advantage might be found in your grading, I am not
open or available to redo it. Provide some evidence and I am
open to correcting grades.
May
7, 2013: As
in past years, at least 20 students could not manage to fill out
their student ID# on their ScanTron cards. As always, this costs
me a day's work decoding their mistakes. All the mistakes except
for one and that might be our mistake have been fixed. On
myCourses, you can see the incremented process of grading. The
curving as in other years is quite extreme in order to lift
grades into the distribution of expectations. The grade curving
brings the class average to 75.07%. 75.05% is reported as the
class average on myCourses because the two students who graded
above 100% after all the curving are automatically reduced to
100% by myCourses. While I shall not provide the curving formula
in detail, let me note that as in other years, a bonus mark of
+14 was added to every student's grade in order to bring us to
the expected 18.5% of full A grades. For students who didn't
reach the A grade, a further scaling was applied according to
the the distance from the A grade so as to produce the promised
75% class average. This process left some D grades which may be
failures if one is taking the course pass-fail or as a required
credit. Technically, the course is required in no program but it
seems that some students have managed to negotiate a required
3-credit status for the course. I am already late in submitting
marks; I shall do that first thing in the morning. I am not open
to negotiating any grades but I would be open to listening to
appeals from those who have received D grades. It should be
noted that among the D-grading students, not a single one of
them did any term work. Term work clearly helps.
There are two
or three outstanding issues that will have to be fixed up during
a subsequent change of grade.
May
5, 2013: Raw
partial grades are in now but they can't be posted until I
manage to decode some errors of student ID# entry. If you make a
mistake on your ID entry, the computer might not find a student
with the ID or may find a student who corresponds to the ID
number you enter and assign the grades to them. I should be able
to work all of this out but it usually takes a few hours to find
the right student ID/student correlation because so many of you
make mistakes in this entry. Be patient until Monday afternoon;
don't worry about the possible assignment of an F grade. I don't
do that.
May
2, 2013: Final
exams are being graded now. Partial grades might be available
over the weekend but a final, scaled grade won't be available
until Tuesday evening at the earliest. While the course is done
for most of you, I encourage you to take some interest in what
we are learning about our Solar System and the Universe beyond.
Here is a stunning image of Enceladus
during
a major geyser eruption. The geysers are saline water carrying
some organic compounds. There could be microbial life within
Enceladus, below its frozen surface. Also, remember that Comet
ISON will
graze the Sun in late December. It is already active.
April
22, 2013: The
exam rooms at the Cineplex have been modified according to
family name:
Cineplex 8: Aba
to Gli ; Cineplex 10: Gol to McC; Cineplex 12: Mcl to Zve
Remember to bring you McGill ID card.
April
16, 2013: While
you might not need to review this story, the “Mapping
of the Universe” is
well discussed by Tom Ashcroft, Charles Lawrence, and Sean
Carroll.
The
examination location for our course is now scheduled:
We
shall be writing at 2:00PM, April 30 at the Cineplex:
Cinéma
Banque Scotia Montréal / Scotiabank Montreal Theater
located
at 977
Sainte Catherine Street West (corner
of Sainte Catherine and Metcalfe). There are 3 entrances to the
Cineplex. We recommend that you enter
through the doors located on Metcalfe Street
just
north of Sainte Catherine Street. You may also access the
Cineplex from the entrance on Sainte Catherine Street or from
the underground mall between Les Cours Mont-Royal and Simons.
Upon arriving
at the Cineplex, please proceed directly up both sets of
escalators. Depending on the time of your arrival at the top of
the escalators, you will be met by one or both of Cineplex and
Exams Office personnel. You
must present your McGill ID card to
be allowed access to the individual theaters. Once you have
presented your McGill ID, please proceed up the next set of
escalators to the top floor where theaters 8, 10, 11, & 12
are located. The exam
schedule (to
be posted Sunday, April 14) will indicate the theater number
where your exam will be held. In addition, there will be signs
throughout the Cineplex indicating the exams being held in each
theater. There will also be Exam Office personnel (wearing
nametags) available to answer questions and direct you to the
appropriate exam room. If you have questions, you can also
proceed to the Exam Office located in the glass room on the same
floor as theaters 8, 10, 11, & 12.
April
11, 2013-bis: I
promised in class today to connect you to a couple of
asteroseismology sites. The first 3 minutes of this video give
you some asteroseismic
stellar vibrations.
You can download some other stellar oscillations here.
Note these tones have been time-upscaled by, perhaps, 20-30
octaves to bring them into the range of human hearing.
April
11, 2013: Last
class –clean-up! Exam preparation: Do the pre-final
practice quiz and Quiz #5-review (two attempts) which counts,
look to the Thursday-after-quiz lectures for the answers to
questions from the first 4 quizzes, you might try the one old
exam that is available online: 2006
Summer Session , watch
the online video “Terra
Firma” [
Part
1, Part
2, Part
3, Part
4 ]
... and
for those of you who are still insecure, I shall run a
question-answer session in Room 232, FDAdams Building between
2:30PM and 6:30PM on April 29. I remain available via course
e-mail. I shall run and re-run the video during that
question-answer session as well.
Term
papers: I
have all term papers available today in class; I shall make them
available again during the question-answer session on April 29.
April
9, 2013: I
shall return the term papers today and Thursday. Grades are
given as letter grades; numerical grades will be assigned so
that the average for term paper grades is as at least as high as
the average for the quizzes (and vice-versa). While I can't
promise the exact grade, I expect that an A grade will
correspond to about 90%. I expect all grades will be about 5%
higher than the letter-grade equivalent minimum.
Look
to the March 27 entry for useful exam suggestions. Recall that
the exam is presently scheduled for April 30 at 2:00PM.
Examination rooms have not yet been assigned: watch this site:
http://www.mcgill.ca/students/exams/
Note that three OSD students will be writing a different and
special exam on May 1 for reason of examination conflicts.
Computer
modelling of the internal heat distribution of Io as caused by
its repeating tidal stressing does not accord with the surface
volcanic activity: Scientists
to Io: Your Volcanoes Are in the Wrong Place
The
music playing? Mémoire d'une
Étoile composition©
by
Paige Stumborg and Farshad Eshghi-Sanati
April
4, 2013: We
only have 3 lecture periods left and I shall need them to finish
the course. Normally, I run a video during the last session but
I don't have the room this year. In lieu of running that video,
you can receive it online from last year's course – the
final lecture. This link is still open:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2012-Winter&Course=EPSC-180-001
Also,
I shall seek an on-line feed of this video from other sources
and post it as soon as I find one with good resolution. The
video title is: The
Planets Series – Terra Firma (BBC/A&E)
[
Part
2, Part
3, Part
4 available here in good resolution in 4 parts] I recommend
this video to you because it answers perhaps 20% of the
questions on the final exam.
Term
papers: I
shall bring the graded term papers to class next week (both
days). Emma has graded them generously but numerical grades may
yet be lifted so as to accord with quiz grades.
The
final quiz: You
may notice that the Quiz#5-review becomes available tomorrow. It
will remain open until 2:00PM, April 30 just as the final exam
starts. You can do this quiz twice. Your grade will be the
average of your two grades. I suggest that you only choose to do
it the first time following the completion of the lectures and
your security with the materials of the whole course.
April
2, 2013: As
we approach summer, we begin to see the best views of the Milky
Way.
On a clear dark night, look to the high eastern sky before
midnight. You should be able to see the central dense region of
our galaxy.
This
past weekend's images from the SOHO
observatory
show 3
planets crossing the field its
imaging field.
I am proposing
to have an whole afternoon question-answer session on April 29.
Because some of you might have exams that afternoon, I shall
schedule the session late: 2:30PM-6:30PM. Please watch this page
for further information.
March
27, 2013: Students
have asked what the short-answer questions might look like.
Better than directly answering that question, I shall give you
the first question in each section of exam. It has 4 sections.
Note all versions of the exam will have the same questions, only
differently ordered. The first multiple-choice question from
Version 1 will appear somewhere in Versions 2-4. Final
2013 preview. Some
past exams are said to be available in the library.
Multiple-choice and true-false questions are eliminated from
library versions. However one relatively complete version is
available from the 2006
Summer Session .
There will be no “bubble-chart” question on this
year's exam. It is replaced by 20 true-false (with deduction for
incorrect responses) on this exam. As a test, this year, the
exam has been much shortened as I am hoping that I won't have to
curve the grades as severely as in past years. Still, I do
suggest that you take all the time you have to consider your
answers.
March
26, 2013: Quiz
#4 is on for tomorrow. It opens at 9:00AM. The next, the
Prefinal Review Quiz #5 will open next Wednesday but I suggest
you wait a few days after that to start doing it. You will get 2
attempts for Quiz #5; the average of the grades on the 2
attempts will record as the quiz grade. This latter quiz will
remain open until April 30.
March
21, 2013: Dates
but not locations for the final exams have now been set: EPSC
180 001 The
Terrestrial Planets Apr
30 2 pm This
year, there are no McGill-accepted “Holy
Days” that
conflict with our final exam schedule or any quizzes, possibly
excepting the quiz of March 27 and the Final Exam for Eastern
Orthodox Christians. Still should you ascribe to some religion
that is not acknowledged by McGill policies (e.g. Santa Ria,
Diasporic African, Cao Dai, Chinese Traditional, Tenrikyo,
Unitarian Universalist, Scientology, Raellian, Rastafarian,
etc.) and you are date-conflicted with a clear religious reason
for not being able to write the final exam, you could ask
permission from the Office of Student Affairs to write the
Deferred Final Exam in August. There will be no other special
exams offered in replacement during the April exams period...
and as this note relates to religious celebrations, I wish those
who celebrate it a Happy Norouz!
The
ESA's
(European Space Agency) Planck
mission has
remeasured the cosmic microwave background to find a slightly
older “age” for our Universe – about 13.82
billion years. It has also found evidence that repartitions
ordinary matter (4.9%), dark matter (26.8%) and dark energy
(68.3%). Planck gives us a higher-resolution “baby
picture”.
In continuation of the early Universe story, tonight the
astrophysics group of the Department of Physics is presenting
another public AstroNight.
Next
Thursday, following the Quiz #4 review, I shall show the BBC
Horizon series video, “Most
of the Universe is Missing”.
That video relates especially to our discovery of dark matter
based upon the simple orbital dynamics we will be discussing in
the next days. The in-class showing will be of higher resolution
than that of the link I noted in the previous sentence, but if
you miss the Thursday class, I suggest you watch it online.
March
18, 2013: Extremophile
bacteria have
been found within the oceanic basaltic crust. This may be the
largest ecosystem on the planet. This might be a good topic for
a term paper if you are desperate to find one.
March
13, 2013: The
current Quiz#3 seems to be running without a hitch today. Still,
if there is a problem with your connection, you can e-mail
me with an explanation and perhaps I can do something about
it. In the meantime, tomorrow, I open the Prefinal_Quiz on the
myCources website. I shall, from time-to-time, add some more
questions to this quiz. The questions I add will be selected
from among those that received the poorest response in the
previous quizzes. You are free to do this quiz as many times as
you like. It does not count toward grade.
The
evening is clear; try to catch a glimpse of PanSTARRS
just
after sunset tonight.
March
12, 2013: Tomorrow,
we have the 3rd
of
our 5 quizzes. The material for this quiz reaches to page 61 of
the current noteset. I ask you to read ahead into those 3 or 4
pages if we don't cover this section of the noteset in today's
lecture.
March
9, 2013: Now
that the study week is over, it might be a good time to look to
the western sky. A faint but visible comet called PanSTARRS
can
be seen just after sunset in the western sky. With a clear night
and a good view of the low western horizon, you might look for
it. The top of Mount Royal may offer a good view. Track the
sunset to the horizon and then search for the comet 20 minutes
after sunset. The comet will be setting too and so won't be
visible for very long after sunset. The skychart linked above
should work for us here in Montreal. PanSTARRS is entering the
inner solar system from the Oort cloud with a highly-inclined
and apparently hyperbolic
orbit when
referenced to the Sun. It's orbital period may well be more than
1 million years. NASA's
Comet Watch site
keeps you up-to-date on interesting comet and asteroid passages
in the inner Solar System. You might also look to NASA
Astronomer Jane
Houston Jone's podcast concerning
Comet PanSTARRS and Comet ISON.
If
one were standing on Mars on October 19, a very bright comet,
2013
A1 would
be as bright as the brightest stars in the sky. It will pass
very close to, and possibly even impact, Mars. It won't be
visible to the naked eye from Earth.
February
26, 2013: Perhaps
the strongest stimulus for the many international space programs
concerns the search for extra-terrestrial life. Presently, we
search for water and expect that life will find a hold in any
condition where water might exist. Mars is now our favourite
candidate in the search: Mars
May Be Habitable
Over
the study break next week, I would like you to read up just a
little concerning the planets and moons of our Solar System.
Wikipedia is an excellent source of basic information. Check
these sites: Solar
System, Mercury,
Venus, Earth,
Moon, Mars,
Asteroids,
Jupiter
(Galilean
satellites), Saturn
(Titan,
Enceladus,
Iapetus),
Uranus,
Neptune
(Triton),
Pluto, Kuiper
Belt Objects, Oort
Cloud, Comets.
Scan them for interest; I am not asking your to “study”
them.
February
21, 2013: A
recent article in The
Economist argues
for increased efforts of Asteroid
Defense.
I have abstracted the risk
chart from
Chapman and Morrison's analysis of asteroid
impact frequency.
February
19, 2013: NASA's
Multimedia Video Gallery provides
a nice animation of a solar-planetary
system in formation.
Also, here, Kepler
Overview.
Today, Google
celebrates
the 540th
annniversary
of Conpernicus' birth with their search site animated doodle.
February
18, 2013: The
Kepler
Mission,
launched in March 2009, has been continually looking for planets
that eclipse the disk of their mother stars. Over 150 000
main-sequence stars in our region of the Milky Way are being
sequentially observed. So far Kepler has discovered almost 3000
candidate planets, over 2000 eclipsing binary stars and
confirmed 107 new exoplanets. This sample suggests that there
must be at least a billion possibly habitable, rocky planets in
our galaxy. The Kepler Mission's science is managed by NASA's
Ames
Research Center.
The project scientists invite you to become a Planet
Hunter..
Kepler
is capable of seeing small, even Earth-size planets. Many more
larger, Jupiter and super-Jupiter planets have been detected
during the past 20 years using doppler measurements of their
mother star's wobbling as these planets orbit. By the doppler
method, over 2800 planets have been confirmed. ExoPlanets
assembles
the current catalogue.
February
15, 2013: The
story of the day that relates to some of the topic of
yesterday's lecture is that of the Russian meteor. There are so
many news and YouTube items on this story that I shall leave it
to you to search your interest. In the lecture, I did mention an
article by Chapman and Morrison that opened the question of
meteoroid/asteroid hazard and that was material in the
implementation of the NEOP
tracking
program. You might look up the paper through McGill's library
service. Look for the article with title: Impacts
on the Earth by asteroids and comets: assessing the hazard
February
14, 2013: A
little more on 2012
DA14.
Twelve years ago this week, NEAR
Shoemaker landed
on
Asteroid
433 Eros.
It had been in orbit about Eros since Valentine's day, 2000.
February
12, 2013: You
might look to the NASA website's Universe
101 site
in reference to the current lectures. This website is a sub-site
of the WMAP
(Wilkinson
Microwave Anistropy Probe) site – the “Baby
Picture”!
Updating
2012
DA14.
February
7, 2013: We
shall start the class by going over the first quiz. Grades were
high as expected and intended. Those questions that you may have
mulled over for a minute or so and which you were least certain
in answering might be seen as indicating the depth of
questioning that will appear on the April final exam. Of course,
then, you won't have your notes or Google to check your answers.
I promise that, while not being necessarily in the exact wording
of questions on this quiz, 5 or 6 of the questions will appear
on the final, so don't erase that knowledge that you now have.
Next
week 2012
DA14 makes
its very close passby of Earth.
58
years ago GK
Persei,
1300 light-years distance from Earth exploded as a nova.
Are supernoval explosions dangerous to life on Earth? Near
Earth Supernova.
February
5, 2013: I
have been asked by another group in Psychology to post a notice
of their study on student motivation and achievement: Link
Here!
Tomorrow we
attempt the first of the online quizzes. The current myCourses
software package seems to be much less competent and
user-friendly for both the student and for me. I might not be
able to help you by resetting quizzes that lockup while you are
doing them. This software package is incompetent and inflexible
but then are there any other qualities of software?
February
1, 2013: Essentially,
this is the same lecture that Brian Schmidt delivered to the
Physics Department this afternoon: The
Path to Measuring Cosmic Acceleration
.
His lecture to the Perimeter Institute.: The
Universe from Beginning to End.
January
31, 2013: This
evening, this year's Anna I. McPherson lecturer is Brian
Schmidt,
winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2011. His lecture, The
Accelerating Universe,
his continuing work and story relates directly to our current
story development in this course.
As I set up the
laptop for the course, those of you who come early should come
to the podium where I have 3 geological samples for viewing and
touching: a fragment of the 1994 Sorel Meteorite, a sample of
the faux-amphibolite of Nuvuaggituk, QC and an associated piece
of a banded iron formation that has been dated to 3.8Ga. Ten
minutes before the end of class as I pack up, you might also
come to the podium to see these samples.
Rather than
seeking out newsworthy stories in preview of today's lecture, I
shall introduce you to the online quiz system as it runs from
the new myCourses site.
January
29, 2013: On
February 15, a relatively small asteroid (2012
DA14)
will pass within 28000km of Earth – video
story from Space.com Update
on Comet
Ison.
Recall the orbit animations for C/2012
S1
I
can't offer you a solar or lunar eclipse during the term of the
course or even this year but you might look to the NASA
eclipse site for
future opportunities. Our next lunar eclipse visible from
Montreal will be seen early in the morning of April 15, 2014. As
for other celestial spectacles, you might watch the SOHO
(Solar
and Heliospheric Observatory) page for solar activity and
possible auroral displays. You might also look to the passage of
Mercury and Venus near the Sun on their animated LASCO
image.
Currently, you see Mercury passing behind the Sun; in March you
might see Mercury pass between Earth and the Sun and then Venus
in its orbit on the far side of the Sun.
January
24, 2013: Today,
I have an important meeting with a job candidate at 3:15PM. I
shall give a short lecture and then load the BBC-Horizon series
video “Different Worlds”. Paola Reyes, the TA whom
you have met, will run the video off my laptop computer. You
could watch this video by linking here: “Different
Worlds” (link
is low resolution).
January
22, 2013: We
introduce the stars of the night sky to you over the next days.
Look to John
Walker's “Your
Sky” to
navigate the heavens. Last night, Jupiter and the Moon were seen
to be very close together in the sky. Tonight the Moon will have
separated off from Jupiter to the west along its path. Check it
out, this might be an occasion for you to orient yourself in the
heavens. You might, also, then look to the separation of the
Moon from Jupiter tomorrow night and so begin to make some sense
of the Moon's orbit about the Earth.
I
refer you, as well, to the The
Milky Way and
Atlas
of the Universe websites
which might help you scale the Universe.
January
18, 2013: In
yesterday's class I mentioned the complicated process by which
Curiosity landed on Mars. Here is a link to a video of that
landing: Curiosty
A
different and even more unusual landing procedure was used for
the Mars
Exploration Rovers
January
17, 2013: As
promised, I introduce the “Term
Paper” project
today and remind you just what might be expected of you if you
choose to do the term work for 30% of grade.
January
15, 2013: Anais
Thibault
Landry who
coordinates Social
Psychology research for
the Department of Psychology's Baldwin Lab is here today to
recruit students for research projects. She has asked that I
open a PowerPoint slide: Class
Recruitment Presentation.ppt She
and her group will take the first 10 minutes of class time for
recruitment.
The
Science Undergraduate Society's annual Academica
Week of
lectures and workshops January 23-27.
January
14, 2013: I
shall miss most of the lecture period on January
24.
The video “Different
Worlds” (link is low resolution)
will
be shown at the end of that class.
January
13, 2013: This
evening, I watched a television program called “Journey
through the Milky Way” on
the Discovery Channel. It well summarizes the material of our
lectures over the next day or next days. I found it, in lower
resolution on YouTube. Click
here!
I don't know if
the Lecture Recording System will be able to recover the January
10 lecture but they haven't managed to do so yet! We hadn't done
much by the time the lights went out!
January
11, 2013: It
was pointed out to me that one of the online quizzes, that
listed for March 6, was scheduled during the winter study break
and this was not intended. I have noted in green colour in the
“Course
overview” page
the corrected dates: March
13, March 27 and April 10.
Please
take note of the change.
January
10, 2013: Further
to C/2012
S1 (Ison).
Later in the course we will see how one can determine the mass
of a star or galaxy by measuring the speed of orbiting bodies.
In
the next lectures I shall tell you that we have measured the
mass of our Milky Way galaxy to infer that it must comprise at
least 400 billion stars. New
measurements suggest
fewer. Our Milky Way is a common barred spiral galaxy. There are
well more than 200 billion galaxies of this size in the
observable Universe.
January
9, 2013: No
real worries concerning Apophis'
possible collision with Earth.
January
8, 2013: The
course begins, welcome!
You
might connect to Space.com
for
further explanation of today's introduction to Winter!
Next
Tuesday, January 15, Anais
Thibault Landry who
coordinates Social
Psychology research for
the Department of Psychology's Baldwin Lab, will be here at
class beginning to recruit students to act a subjects for some
research projects. It is sometimes fun to do so and you will get
a little pay.
During the
course, you might find some helpful and informative videos on
YouTube.
Here is one by Lawrence
Krauss that addresses materials
we shall discuss in next week's lectures.
January
2, 2012: The
National Geographic TV channel recently showed a fanciful
documentary on the end of Earth: Evacuate
Earth.
While I can't assure you that the previous link will take you to
the video, if it does and you choose to watch it, take it all
with a grain of salt. Later in the course, we will discuss
external threats to our Earth. In the meantime, you might might
connect to NASA's Near Earth Objects Program (NEOP
)
website to learn something of those known objects that will come
close to Earth during the next two centuries.
January
1, 2013: It
might be well premature to promise you a wonderful spectacle
during the 2013 November to 2014 January period. What might be
the brightest comet to be visible in the last few hundred years,
Comet
C/2012 Ison is
predicted to graze the Sun on November 29, 2013. Its orbit will
take it to within about 60million kilometres of Earth on
December 26 and then may be brighter than the moon in the early
morning sky. In the meantime and later this week, the Quadrantid
meteor shower
might
be visible.
December
31, 2012: The
first lecture will be held in Leacock 132 at 14h35 on January 8.
Please attend the first lecture if you intend to register in
this course.
News
and highlights – from Winter 2012 sessions
April
29, 2012: Most
of you already know that the exams have been graded and the
grade accumulation curved for the assignment of letter grades.
The overall course
average was
adjusted to 74.99%. The median student's grade was 74.3%.
Through the curving formula, 12 students' grades accumulated to
more than 100% and the 1st
ranked
student's grade curved to over 107%. She obtained a raw grade
88.5% on the final exam. Clearly, it was more than possible to
get an excellent grade in the course and many, many students
did. There were 108 A,
82 A-,
97 B+,
115 B,
94 B-,
57 C+,
33 C
and
4 D
grades.
Each student's ranking in the course is listed on WebCT. That
median student, rank 295 of 590, who received a high B grade
would have received a weak C grade without the generosity of the
grade curving. Most of the students who received A grades
through the curving formula would have received A grades had
they taken the final exam for 100%. The A-grading students did
not shirk in preparing for the exam. Most of the middle to
low-grading students much improved their grade standing through
their term work (quizzes and/or term-papers).
Grades
are now being submitted to Minerva for entry to your
transcripts. Except for minor technical errors which I might be
able to correct, the only way to appeal for a grade review now
is via the formal process: Reassessments
and rereads
April
16, 2012: Tomorrow's
exam will be held in the Arthur
Currie Gymnasium,
475 Pine Avenue West, at 9:00AM.
Note: I shall
be unavailable to answer e-mails following about 9:00PM tonight
as I shall be preparing to go to sleep for an early morning
wake-up.
April
13, 2012: I
don't know why the exams office is not posting the exam
locations online until the day before you sit the exam but to be
sure of where it is to be held, check this website on Monday:
http://www.mcgill.ca/students/exams/
I
expect that the exam will be held in the Arthur
Currie Gymnasium,
475 Pine Avenue West.
April
12, 2012: The
video with which I end today's class is temporarily (I expect.)
available online here in two parts:
Part
1, Part
2 Over
this weekend and to be removed from the course site on Monday
night, I have a download of this video available: Terra
Firma .
Also, if you failed to do the readings asked of you during the
lecture of February, 16, you might profit from watching
this
video which
is being made available through the Library's “Films on
Demand” service that I referred you to on March 2.
My
colleague, John Stix, is speaking this evening at 6:00PM in
Redpath Museum Auditorium on “Supervolcanoes”....
Over intervals of about 1 million years, these might be the
greatest recurring threat to life and biological nature on
Earth.
April
11, 2012: A
large “megathrust” event occurred this morning along
the subduction zone west of Sumatra: M8.6
- off the west coast of northern Sumatra The
seismic record for this event as recorded by the Berkeley
digital seismic network might nicely be explored via Make
Your Own Seismogram.
I suggest that you enter times and scalings (you can vary them
later) as I did: Sumatra-2012-04-11.png
This
event was located very close to that of the devastating Banda
Aceh earthquake of December 26, 2004. It was also followed by a
large M8.2 aftershock. This is the largest event to have
occurred on Earth since the Tohoku-Sendai event of March of last
year.
Note:
I revise my claim, above, that this event was a “megathrust”
event. It was as noted in the description, a “strike-slip”
event. Such is the character of the San Andreas earthquakes in
California. This is a very large magnitude for a
strike-like-slip earthquake but, then, the Sumatra region is
very complex tectonically.
April
10, 2012: I
am receiving many notices about the delay in posting the on-line
videos of the class lectures. I have no control over this. I do,
though, expect that everything up through today's lecture will
be available for the weekend. The delays, however, have spanned
weekends and that means that the last lecture may not be
available until Monday – too late? I suggest, then and if
it is not posted, that you look to the last lecture in last
year's course. It will be very similar to Thursday's lecture and
will give you the video that I shall show to end the course:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2011-Winter&Course=EPSC-180-001
As
you prepare for your exam and, particularly after you have done
the practice quiz, you might refer yourself to the Noteset
for
answers to the questions that you may have missed. The current
Noteset has been minimally revised with a few more useful links
to explanations concerning volcanoes (p. 115, 122) and
throughout Section 8 on Seismology.
April
5, 2012: McGill
colleagues in the Department of Physics are shedding some light
on dark energy! The
South Pole Telescope observatory.
For
information about exams, dates and venues, click
here!
Several
students have come to me worried about the grading of the final
exam. You should review the “Course overview”
(linked above) to be reminded of the grading scheme. The course
is intended to provide honest A
grades
(typically to a minimum of 17.5% of students) while not failing
any conscientious student. Grades are curved according to a
formula whose details cannot be fixed until the raw results of
the examination are available. The curving benefits all students
but those with the poorest performance benefit most. I shall
post your raw numerical grade as well as the curved letter grade
on the course WebCT site by the end of April.
April
3, 2012: Following
today's lecture, we only have 3 more left. We shall have to go
quite rapidly. We might not have the time to get to Section 9 of
the Noteset but, if we don't, I ask you to read Section
9.1 and
9.3
as
I have assigned questions on the final that relate to those two
sections.
March
29, 2012: Study
suggestions in preparation for final:
1.
Do the pre-final practice quiz a few times. If you always
remember to submit your quiz, you will be able to do this quiz
as many times as you want to. When you feel that you are on top
of the practice quiz, do review quiz #5. You can do this twice;
the average of your two grades will be counted. Always remember
to submit your quiz answers. 2. You might also look to the final
“bubble-chart” question on the 2006
summer session final exam.
We will not have a bubble-chart question on this year's exam but
this question becomes a very good tool for slowly assembling
your knowledge of the planets and interesting moons of our Solar
System.
On
writing the final exam: Look
at the preview exam as linked on the March 27 posting here. In
the exam, start by looking it over; spend 5 minutes. After
perusal of the exam begin with Part I, 100x multiple-choice. You
can guess here without penalty. You should do all 100 questions
and then do them again as you might well find that one question
has provided you with the answer to another. Do Part II, 30x
true-false, carefully.
Do not guess as there is a -1 mark penalty for incorrect
answers. There is no penalty for a blank answer. Answer within
the room provided the 6x short-answer questions, Part III ---
tell me what you know! Now, the exam almost finished, relax
during you final 15 minutes by giving me your opinion, Part IV.
Relax, the exam is then done. You won't fail.
March
27, 2012: The
final exam has been composed and submitted. I post a preview
of the exam showing
the cover page (Read the instructions before attending the
exam!) and the headers for the questions of the 4 parts of the
exam along with a question (... from this year's exam) that will
appear. So, in principle, you should be prepared with 6-1/2
marks upon entering the this exam. The examination is scheduled
for April
17 at 9:00AM and probably in the Arthur Currie Gymnasium.
OSD students who have two exams on that day will write a
somewhat different exam on April 25 in the OSD labs and rooms in
the Brown Building. They should check with the OSD for their
time-table.
March
26, 2012: The
McGill
Redmen won
the CIS
Cavendish Cup,
which represents supremacy in University hockey, last night...
congratulations! Are there any members of the team in this
year's class?
Tonight,
March 26, Venus and the Moon appear bright in the sky and below
both, Jupiter: tonight's
sky!
March
23, 2012: Next
Wednesday, the pre-final (and final among them) quiz will be
posted. I suggest that you relax and not strart the quiz until
you are into serious preparation for the final exam. Then you
might do the quiz the first time just to see where your
misunderstandings might be, then study through those and finally
do the quiz the second time during the weekend or evening before
the final on April 17. A pre-final practice quiz has been posted
on WebCT. It will remain available until April 17. It offers 60
questions in 60 minutes. You can do this quiz as many times as
you like. I suggest that you try it a few times before
committing to the pre-final quiz #5.
March
22, 2012: This
story is
now past history but you might, if tonight's sky is clear, pay
attention to just how far apart (angular separation) Venus and
Jupiter now are, just one week after their “conjuction of
March 14. Think about how they have become so separated and with
what direction of separation.
March
20, 2012: This
morning, at about 01h14 EDT, astronomical spring began in
Montreal (and for the whole northern hemisphere). Those of you
who are attending the class will have noted that we are favoured
with a remarkably warm day, one that is fully 16C or 29F warmer
than a normal afternoon for the first day of our spring. I offer
you the option of taking advantage of it. I shall continue the
video Most
of our Universe is Missing and
then follow up with some further descriptions of the details of
the gravity model of galaxies. This will be available online for
you.
Think about the
why and how of spring!
Perihelion Jan 5 01 Equinoxes Mar 20 05 14 Sept 22 14 49
Aphelion July 5 04 Solstices June 20 23 09 Dec 21 11 12
March
14, 2012: During
the second half of today's class, I shall show the video
(promised): Most
of our Universe is Missing
The
publishers of the text, The
Solar System ,
are now providing copies of the book, on-line, in eBook formats.
If you are looking for text-based help related to the course,
you might explore their website: Nelson
Education...
or click the following cover-image:
March
13, 2012: Minimizing
news today! The next quiz comprises materials from the four
lectures since the last quiz and up
to page 85 in
the current noteset.
March
8, 2012: As
I had asked you to pay some attention to the recurrent
appearance of our Moon in the night skies since early January, I
now ask you to pay some attention to Venus
and Jupiter which
are both seen setting in the west during the hours following
sunset. Venus has recently passed maximum “elongation”
(meaning that, there from our perspective, it is about as far
from the Sun as it ever gets) and therefore most well lit. With
a good pair of binoculars, you might be able to see the crescent
lighting of Venus. Venus is an inferior planet (between us and
the Sun) and so has partially lit phases like our Moon; Jupiter
is always (when) seen fully lighted by the Sun. To place the
planets in their orbits, you might recall the NEOP
site
and look to the orbit diagram for one of the threatening
Earth-crossing asteroids.
This
year, there are no McGill-accepted “Holy
Days” that
conflict with our final exam schedule or any quizzes. Still
should you ascribe to some unacknowledged religion (e.g. Santa
Ria, Diasporic African, Cao Dai, Chinese Traditional, Tenrikyo,
Unitarian Universalist, Scientology, Raellian, Rastafarian,
etc.) and you are date-conflicted for the final exam, you could
ask permission from the Office of Student Affairs to write the
Deferred Exam in August. There will be no other special exams
offered in replacement.
March
6, 2012: See
the film Birth
of the Earth It
offers explantion of the story I'm trying to tell you now. If
you break into it at 22:00 minutes, you will come to a place in
the story that introduces the “faux
amphibolites” of
Nuvvuaggittuq. For another story of import concerning our
ancient Earth, come to the Freaky
Friday session
on March 23.
March
2, 2012: McGill's
Library now supports Films
on Demand (on-line
videos, many of which are relevant to this course). If you are
on a McGill IP domain or can use the proxy service, you might
look to this sample from the Earth Sciences catalogue: Birth
of the Earth It
tells the story that I am trying to tell now. Another similar
story is available here: Earth
is Born Note,
to access these films and videos through the normal and official
channel, go to the McGill Library's website and search “Films
on Demand”. You will then link here: “Films
on demand” from
whence you have access to the “Films Media Group”
site. McGill users should be able to gain access to their
film/video catalogue from home computers via the library EZproxy
access..
March
1, 2012: Should
you like to know how well you did on Quiz#3 relative to the rest
of the class, click on this stats
link.
We shall review this 3rd
quiz
during the first half hour of today's class.
February
28, 2012: The
third quiz, February 29, will serve only 2 new lectures because
of the study/holiday week. Because this third quiz covers so
little new material, it will re-cover/re-test some of the
materials from the first 2 quizzes. It will cover materials
found in the noteset through to the end of section 4.5 and the
first few paragraphs of section 4.6 (the three scenarios).
From
M: I
found a cool flash application that has to do with the scale of
the universe, it might be interesting to show the class:
http://htwins.net/scale2/
February
16, 2012: Over
the next few courses, we begin to discuss the planets and moons
of our Solar System. You should try to familiarize yourself with
some of the basic information we have for these bodies. To that
end, I suggest readings. There are many excellent sites that
offer resources that you may want to access. I list some of them
here:
The
nine planets
USGS
Astrogeology and
Map-a-planet
NASA's
Solar System site
Google's
Mars,
Moon
John
Walker's Solar
System Live
Calvin
Hamilton's Views
of the Solar System
JPL's
Welcome
to the Planets
Wikipedia
on The
Solar System
February
14, 2012: Special
note: I was informed today that only the first 24 minutes of the
February 9 lecture was recorded. I don't control the recordings
but I might be able to help just a little. Last year's lectures
are still available online here:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2011-Winter&Course=EPSC-180-001
Look
to an early February lecture for the equivalent story.
A
recent article on Dark
Matter.
A year ago today, Stardust-NExT
probe
had a Valentine's
day date with
comet Tempel 1.
February
9, 2012: As
we are discussing stars
and
galaxies
today,
it might be useful to recall the “Your
Sky” site
to help you find some of those mentioned that might be visible
in this February night sky. As our nights are now somewhat clear
and open, you might again challenge yourself to understand the
orbit and phases of our Moon. You might note that last night was
a “Full Moon”.
Next Wednesday,
we shall have our second online quiz. The third quiz, February
29, will serve only 2 new lectures because of the study/holiday
week. Because this third quiz covers so little new material, it
will re-cover/re-test some of the materials from the first 2
quizzes.
February
7, 2012: The
preliminary final exam schedule has been released. We are
scheduled for 9:00AM,
Tuesday April 17.
This is conveniently early in the exam schedule. Our last
lecture is on April 12; do try to attend this as well as the
April 10 lecture.
I
expect that you all know that our Sun (Sol)
is a star and except for it being our star, it is a pretty
ordinary G2V
star,
one of the most common types in our region of our Milky Way.
OBAFGKMLT
(by
Diane Nalini).
February
2, 2012: Today
we start with the review of the first quiz. Then, moving into a
news item that relates well to our current lecture, we visit The
Milky Way and
Atlas
of the Universe .
As a tool for identifying stars in our night sky, I suggest you
become comfortable with John Walker's “Your
Sky”.
Presently, Mercury is passing behind the Sun from our
perspective (LASCO
c3 image).
You might also look to this site (Near
Earth Objects Progect)
which shows the orbit of that known object,
2011
AG5,
that is so-far known to be that one with greatest probability of
a damaging collision with the Earth in the next 100 years. On
this site you can also follow the orbits of the planets and
Mercury in particular relating to today's observation.
January
31, 2012:
Rather
than introduce some news item during the first 10 minutes of
class, I shall go over the procedure for doing the quiz. I
suggest that those of you who have not yet tried to do the
practice quiz, do so a couple of times today or tonight. The
icon for the first quiz that might contribute to your term work
grade will appear tomorrow on the WebCT
site
at 9:00AM. The external (that on my computers) site does not
serve the quiz. For this first quiz, you can do it twice and
your better grade will be that that counts.
January
26, 2012: By
the end of today's class, we will have come to “supernovae”,
stars that have exploded. A recent article in Nature shows a
very interesting image obtained by the Chandra
X-ray space telescope of
the remnant of a type 1a supernova, SNR
0509-67.5,
that exploded about 400 years ago in the Large
Magellenic Cloud,
a small satellite galaxy of our Milky
Way:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/481149a
If
you are connected on the McGill domain, “mcgill.ca”,
the previous link should take you to the article.
Publicity:
The next Freaky
Friday
January
24, 2012: CBC's
weekly science show, Quirks
and Quarks,
had two items this past Saturday that pertain to the course. 1.
Cambrian
Tulip Patch (Lorna
O'Brien), 2. A Universe
from Nothing (Lawrence
Krauss).
The
largest flux of solar particles in the past six years is now
affecting Earth and disturbing its magnetic field. If we have a
very clear night, you might be able to see aurora in the
norrthern skies tonight. The solar wind and solar activity is
constantly being monitored by the SOHO
(Solar
and Heliospheric Observatory) and the STEREO
(Solar
TErrestrial RElations Observatory) co-orbiting probes.
I
am already one week late in informing you of the Essay/Term
Paper style
and question.
January
19, 2012: Tomorrow's
Freaky Friday lecture: The
Misunderstanding of Dinosaurs,
Emily Bamforth.
One
of your classmates sent me an e-mail with reference to
precambrian fossils that were discovered and studied by Emily
Bamforth from a period preceding the Cambrian that is being
called the Ediacaran:
“This
is just a link to an article about a species of neoproterozoic
biota which was discovered recently in Newfoundland, to browse
if you
like:
http://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/5433
Indeed,
"large" multicellular life (though not necessarily
hard-bodied) existed before the Cambrian explosion, and I'm in
some ways inclined to believe a more radical theory that the
vast diversity of life found in the Cambrian existed prior to
the explosion, but did not have optimal fossilization conditions
until then. A quick search for "molecular clocks"
might give a better explanation than I can for this. Hopefully
you don't already know all about this!”
Several
reports in the last days point to the discovery of a meteroritic
rock that has been blasted by impact from the surface of Mars.
This meteorite is in the “Shergottite” class, named
after a meteorite that fell in Sherghati, India in 1865. It was
probably blasted from Mars by the same impact as that 1865
meteorite: Martian-originated
meteorites. WikiPedia
is back online; see Martian
meteorites for
further information.
January
17, 2012: You
might be interested in following the Faculty of Science's
Cutting Edge Lecture Series. This week Non-invasive
mapping of the human brain by
Alan Evans.
One of your
colleagues pointed out that the volume through the “prof
mic” on the last video recording is too low and when you
raise the volume to listenable levels, there is a high-frequency
noise. At almost 69years, one does not hear high frequencies so
I didn't notice. I shall endeavour to use much higher volume on
the microphone input.
A
video explanation of the GRAIL
project.
Note
that January 24 is the ADD/DROP
deadline.
I would like students who might like to join the course and who
find that it is “full” to wait until Thursday after
class to ask me for a special reservation while all the while
trying to get a place for themselves.
January
13, 2012: At
the beginning of last day's lecture, I showed a video animation
of the launch-to-landing of the Mars Exploration Rovers. The
current mission with the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity
Rover) launch-to-landing is available in this
video (*.mov
format) and in a shorter narrated version here
(*.mp4
format).
January
12, 2012: The
video recording of the January 10 class is available, now,
online. For those of you who missed the last class, nothing was
missed if you watch or listen to the recording. I have asked
that the recording site offer the BcoolTV option which seems to
be missing for this year's recordings.
We haven't had
much good luck with clear nights but I still encourage you to
watch the Moon each night and try to make some sense of its
phases and its orbital period about the Earth from the
perspective of the rotating Earth. We shall deal with all of
this and tides, as well, later in the class.
Interested
in what is going on in the Faculty of Science at McGill?... Soup
and Science
How
many galaxies? How many stars? How many planets? More
planets than stars?
January
10, 2012: Yesterday,
January 9, the Moon was in “full
moon” phase in
which the entire side facing Earth was illuminated by sunlight.
It rose, from the perspective of Montreal, at 17h15. Think about
it: when will it rise this evening? A sliver of the edge of the
Moon will lose illumination this evening. Think about it: which
edge? Over the next week or so, you might take notice of the
Moon's trajectory across the night sky and its timing. Later in
the course, we shall dwell on this issue for half a class! Also,
for the fun of it, you might click on the image of the Moon in
the upper right-hand corner of this news page.
The
Moon and the distribution of mass within its body is the object
of NASA's most recent mission: GRAIL
(Gravity
Recovery and Interior Laboratory)
Participants
are needed for Social Psych research:
interested?
The
program research group will be here to recruit from among you,
next Tuesday, January 17.
January
9, 2012: The
course website is pretty much reconstructed for the current
semester. See you tomorrow.
December
11, 2011: The
course website is presently under construction --- a little
patience.
News
and highlights – Winter 2011- Archive
May
11, 2011:
Recent
orbital calculations determine that the Oort Cloud visitor to
our inner Solar System, Comet
Elenin (C/2010 X1),
will not pass very close to Earth. When it is closest, though,
it would be travelling with an intercept speed of 86000km/hr. It
is a small comet, but if it were to hit Earth with this speed,
damage could be catastrophic. This comet was discovered by
Russian astronomer, Leonid Elenin, only last December. From
discovery to its closest approach to Earth provides an interval
of only 9 months. Concerning our ability to manage, somehow,
possible Earth-colliding objects, you might be reminded that, in
class, we noted that comets rather than asteroids are probably
the most nearly impossible to deal with as there is so little
time between discovery and possible impacts. Of course, this
time and this comet is not threatening. It is a small comet but
it just might be marginally
visible in early September.
Watch for it.
April
27, 2011: Exams
have been graded; term work has been compiled into forming a
course grade. Grades have been published to Minerva and should,
later today, become secured on your transcripts and record. I am
not prepared to do any more for you in inflating your grades
than has been done here. Should you want to complain about a
grade, you will have to do so via the normal
channels for appeal.
Neither I nor my TAs will be allowed to regrade your work.
Before you appeal your grade, you should know that the exam
would be regraded without direct reference to the curvings that
have been used to determine your assigned letter grade. My
curvings are probably more generous than any you might receive
from whomever is assigned to a regrading. You might look to this
explanation as to just what was done to inflate your grade: On
grading ESPC 180 .
We
have one exam paper with no name on it and we have not been able
to determine just whose paper it is. What I can tell you about
the paper is that the student did not write an “Opinion”
essay but did very well on the short-answer section. One clue to
the paper: the question concerning Andrea Ghez' discovery of a
black hole at the centre of our galaxy was answered with a
diagram of the stellar orbits about that unseen gravitational
hole. If you recognize this paper as possibly being yours, get
in touch with me.
April
5, 2011: What
will the exam look like? Here (demo-exam.pdf)
is the front page of one version of the exam and the headers to
the question sets. The exam will be held as follows:
EPSC
180 001
The
Terrestrial Planets Apr
11 9 am Jensen
Aas
-
Zoh
GYM MAIN
GYM
EPSC
180 002
The
Terrestrial Planets Apr
11 9 am Jensen
Aas
-
Zoh
GYM MAIN
GYM
Map
showing the Arthur
Currie Gymnasium/Sports Complex.
This is the
suggestion I am passing on to students as being, possibly, the
most direct way to prepare for the final exam at this late date:
The
exam asks no math from you. Now, this year and for the
first time, I have tried to make preparation easier for students
by creating a 60-question prefinal practice quiz. Do it,
honestly, a few times. I suggest that just memorizing
answers to the practice quiz is not "honest" in the
sense that you won't have learnt what the question really asks.
I would suggest that you do the quiz, note any topics that you
were unsure of, look into the topic, and then do the quiz
again. You can do it as many times as you like. Its
purpose is not to leak questions that might be on the exam to
you. It is to cover the material of the course to the
depth (somewhat shallow) which is expected of you. You
should also do the Quiz#5-review after you have done the
practice a couple of times. You can do this quiz twice and
your average grade of the two quizzes can count toward your 30%
term grade if that is what you had chosen to do. You
should do this Quiz#5-review even if you are writing the final
for 100% or wrote a term paper. I suggest that you listen/watch
the first 40 minutes of the lecture that followed (the
immediately following Thursday) each of the first four quizzes.
There we went over the answers.
If you do
this, and become comfortable with these quizzes, and you should
be in good shape for the final. I suggest that you
could do all of this in one long day. To make this task of
studying more agreeable, do it all with friends and argue the
points that you don't understand.
April
4, 2011: The
prefinal practice quiz's record on WebCT (from my end of WebCT)
has become very cluttered through some of your multiple runs
through the quiz. I have no intention of limiting your multiple
tries of the quiz but I am going to clean out the record of past
tries wherever the number of past tries is beomes too large.
This should have no bearing at all on your access of use of the
prefinal practice quiz. I would also like to caution those of
you who are just trying to memorize 60 answers to 60 questions.
You should know that questions on the final might not always
correspond to similar questions on this practice quiz. For many
of the questions, new and also correct answers might appear in
the list of choices.
April
1, 2011: I
link you to a
nice animated reminder of
the plate-tectonic boundary processes (credit: Prentice Hall
Publishing Co.)
March
31, 2011: The
topics covered in this course are very quickly evolving. Just
last January, I was describing a “Big
Bang” model
of the universe. It may be deeply flawed! This recent article in
Scientific American, “The
Inflation Debate”,
reopens many issues. I hope this course has prepared you for
your continuing and necessary upgrading of the story.
March
29, 2011: We
are now beginning to discuss how we might infer what structure,
condition and processes are likely to describe the interior of
the terrestrial planets and moons. What we would like, what we
can't have, is a direct view into these bodies. Even here on
Earth, we have not managed to drill more than 12.3km into our
planet. Everything else we know about our planet's interior is
through geophysical, astronometric and geological inferences.
The Kola
Superdeep Hole – as
deeply as we have seen.
The final Quiz
#5-review becomes available tomorrow at 9:00AM. You can do it
twice; your grades will be averaged. I suggest, though, that you
do this new practice quiz a few times before you do Quiz
#5-review for credit.
March
24, 2011: As
another aid in helping you to prepare for your final exam, I am
planning to add another 45 multiple-choice questions to the
Practice Quiz over this coming weekend. It should then cover the
whole course. I suggest that you do this practice quiz a couple
of times before you do the final (Quiz #5-review) for credit.
You can do the practice quiz as many times as you want to. I
believe it is set up so that you can learn your grade as soon as
you have saved and submitted your answers.
A
super-cold brown dwarf (T-class star or perhaps even a new class
of its own) has been found: WD
0806-661B
March
23, 2011: The
final exam from the 2006 Summer Session is available
here.
The format of that past exam is very different from this year's
exam which comprises 100 multiple-choice questions, 30
true-false questions, 6 short-answer questions and 1 opinion
question. Still the bubble-chart (true-false) question in this
past exam might prove very useful in preparing for this year's
exam. Rather than 150 questions on the bubble-chart, there will
be only 30 true-false questions on the April 11 final.
March
22, 2011: Mercury
Messenger reached
orbit around Mercury March
18, 2011 00:45 UTC. After
a shakedown of its systems, it will begin sending images and
spectral maps of the surface next week. March
17, 2011: This
evening, the Mercury
Messenger probe
will fire retro-rockets for 15 minutes in order to slow it down
for orbital capture by Mercury. It will begin its mapping of the
surface morphology, spectral mapping of the geochemistry of the
rocky surface and mapping of geophysical fields surrounding the
planet in about 2 weeks. I am not sure that I have the best
streaming media link here but at 8:00PM tonight, you might be
able to join the webcast
of
the insertion burn.
March
14, 2011: The
major news of the last year relating to the Earth and planets is
that of the Mw
~ 9, Honshu earthquake of March 11.
We shall deal with earthquakes soon and this one in a little
detail. However, presently we are focussing on planetary orbits
and rotations and what affects them. You may have heard that the
Earth's
rotation axis should have shifted by
as much as 14cm following the Honshu earthquake. It is better to
think of this “shift” as the body of the Earth
sliding across the rotation axis which actually remains
relatively fixed in inertial space over short time intervals.
Every 5 days, and averaged with a 5-day window, the Earth's
geographical coordinate origin pole is mapped relative to the
rotation axis by the International
Earth Rotation Service.
Because the coordinate origin is so important to very accurate
navigation over the Earth, the United
States Naval Observatory publishes
daily origin predictions for the updating of the satellite GPS
system. You might check this plot over the next week to see the
jump in the residual coordinate origin relative to the rotation
axis caused by the Honshu event: Polar
Motion Plot .
You might note that this graph presents the rotation axis in
geographical coordinates; 1 milli-arcsecond (one graph interval
step) is equivalent to about 3 cm of displacement. You might
also note that this plots the residual to the current
wobble amplitude which
is about 300x greater than this small interval during the year.
March
10, 2011: Mercury
Messenger .
Today,
I started showing the BBC (Horizons) video entitled “Most
of the Universe is Missing”.
I'll complete it next day; in the meantime you can catch it
online through the previous link.
March
7, 2011: In
about a week or so, we will begin to discuss volcanism on the
terrestrial planets and moons of the giants. Mauna
Kea on
Hawaii's large island is one of the most continually active
volcanoes on Earth. It is active now.
In
10 days, Mercury
Messenger will
undergo its orbital insertion burn. Over the next years, we
shall learn much about this enigmatic planet.
A
scientific controversy – possibility of life having been
found in a carbonaceous chondrite: Panspermia?
March
3, 2011: We
haven't had clear nights coinciding with recent auroral
displays. However, the Sun is now quite active and you might
catch some auroral displays on clear nights during a 2-3 hour
window centred around midnight. The displays would be expected
toward the north – look for the “Big Dipper”.
As
I checked out the SOHO
site
to learn of the current solar activity, I noted that SOHO's
LASCOM
camera has
captured two planets orbiting the Sun in its field of view. The
brighter of the two is Venus, passing behind the Sun, the dimmer
Mars. We can only see Mars in this perspective when it passes
behind the Sun but because Venus is an inferior (meaning its
orbit is closer to the Sun than Earth's) planet, we can also see
Venus as it passes between us and the Sun. Then, Venus appears
to move left-to-right in the image. You might think about this
as we come to our discussion of planetary orbits.
February
28, 2011: Meteorite
'could have carried nitrogen to Earth'
February
25, 2011: The
European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large
Telescope's (VLT) study of T
Chamaeleontis (T Cha) shows
the accretion of a planetary system in its surrounding nebular
cloud.
Within
the week, I shall show a video entitled “Most
of the Universe is Missing” which
is concerned with the discovery of dark matter. In that video,
you will meet Mordehai Milgrom, a physicist at Israel's Weizmann
Institute, who has an alternative argument for the galactic
“rotation curve” anomalies: Dark
matter theory challenged by gassy galaxies result
An
important note: One
of your classmates has discovered that WebCT will log you out
automatically after 90 minutes of connect time. I don't think it
does this to me and so I had not known of the issue. I suggest
that in doing the quizzes, you log
out of
WebCT just before you want to do the quiz and then
log in again to
take the quiz. Don't open the quiz until after you have logged
in again. Then the connection will remain open for 90 minutes
according to the information I have received. Thank you, Lisa.
February
22, 2011: It
is my very poor organization that brings us to a quiz
on March 2.
Still we shall have this quiz. In order that it be useful to
you, the materials that will be covered will review the planets
(2nd
pass
on the planets listed in the Feb. 15 posting below) as well as
the new materials that will be covered during the March 1
lecture. This should take us through page 67 in the noteset.
February
18, 2011: The
final exam has been scheduled: Monday,
April 11 at 9:00AM.
February
17, 2011: Generally,
the midterm went well and with only a few problems. I don't have
solutions to all possible problems but as there are 5 quizzes
and your 3 best can form the 30% term-work grade, you should
expect that you will be able to accumulate 3 good results.
Whatever problems some of you faced at your ends – there
were a few resets of the quizzes and I don't know if these were
the result of a problem with your computer/browser/internet link
– but of the 500+ submissions, only about 5 students from
the two classes complained that they were shutdown during the
quiz.
Next
week is “study break” and a good opportunity for you
to consider what you might do for a term
paper.
The term-paper will take precedence over the quizzes for the
term-work grade. Average grades for the term-paper and quiz
term-work will be brought to the same number so that your choice
for the term-work contribution will be minimally biased. And you
should note, again, the implicit promises concerning grading
that were made during the first class and which are published on
the course
overview page.
Perhaps
“Dark
Matter” is
a topic that might interest you as a topic for a term paper.
Video on YouTube: Dark
Matter in 3D.
February
15, 2011: In
today's class, we briefly summarize the stories of the planets
via the link-list following:
Distance Radius Mass
Planet (000 km) (km) (kg) Discoverer Date
--------- --------- ------ ------- ---------- -----
Mercury 57,910 2439 3.30e23
Venus 108,200 6052 4.87e24
Earth 149,600 6378 5.98e24
Mars 227,940 3397 6.42e23
Jupiter 778,330 71492 1.90e27
Saturn 1,426,940 60268 5.69e26
Uranus 2,870,990 25559 8.69e25 Herschel 1781
Neptune 4,497,070 24764 1.02e26 Galle 1846
Pluto 5,913,520 1160 1.31e22 Tombaugh 1930
You should review these pages in preparation for the February 16 Quiz.
February
12, 2011: In
a recent Q&Q interview of Dr. Dan Hooper of FermiLab, he
made a claim that a new effect of Dark
Matter has
been detected. I
came upon a paper that might spur some interest from some of
you: on oldest
zircons on our Moon.
February
10, 2011: A
recent modelling of early (those stars that formed at 200Ma
after the Big Bang) seems to suggest that the formed in groups:
First
star formation.
Our late-forming sun (Sol) probably formed as shown in this
animation: Formation
of the Solar System.
Another animation: Solar
System animation.
More on the story of planetary
formation.
Wednesday's
quiz will cover material from the last quiz through page 50 of
the current
noteset.
I expect you to have also acquired some of the basic knowledge
of the Solar System and planets as this first
look forms
half of today's lecture and that of Tuesday, next.
February
8, 2011: Finally,
we come to the planets. Over the next few days, we shall be
introducing the planets of the Solar System. There are many
excellent sites that offer resources that you may want to
access. I list some of them here:
The
nine planets
USGS
Astrogeology and
Map-a-planet
NASA's
Solar System site
Google's
Mars,
Moon
John
Walker's Solar
System Live
Calvin
Hamilton's Views
of the Solar System
JPL's
Welcome
to the Planets
Wikipedia
on The
Solar System
February
3, 2011: The
first pass of the online quizzes worked very well (better this
year than last). There were only a few problems encountered by
students and those who contacted me by e-mail has fixes where
necessary. Wednesday is a busy day for me as I lecture a 3-hour
course in the evenings and so don't return home until about
10:00PM. I did look at the last e-mails and made sure that for
those of you who still awake for the end of the session that you
would be informed of what I could do for you. Today, we will
review the quiz.
In
the last 15 years, we have learnt that ours is not the only
planetary system in our region of our galaxy. NASA has just
announced the “discovery” of 54
planets orbiting
other stars that might be habitable.
The
video I showed in class today is available here
on
YouTube.
January
31, 2011: The
quizzes will appear and become available to you on WebCT by
9:00AM Wednesday (February 2) morning. For
this first quiz (only), I am allowing you to do the quiz twice.
This
should help you to gauge the expectations I have for what you
might understand of the course. You can do the quiz in the
morning and then again in the afternoon or evening. The average
grade of the two attempts will be counted. You can improve your
grade by doing the quiz a second time after having reviewed the
questions that you were unsure of in the first pass.
January
27, 2011: There has been some
confusion on the course website concerning the due date for the
term paper. I have, I think, now fixed the date consistently to
March 15, 2011.
Penalties will not apply for any papers handed in during the
week of March 14-18 as the confusion of dates was mine.
As
Mars passes behind the Sun from the perspective of Earth,
communication with the MERs (Mars Exploration Rovers) is to be
suspended for a few days. It is now 7 years since the rovers,
Opportunity
and Spirit,
landed on Mars. They were designed to operate for 90 days but
they seem to go on and on. Spirit has not yet been roused from
its Mars-winter nap that began almost a year ago.
The
Milky Way:
this very nice site demonstrates the size and scale of the
Universe. The Atlas
of the Universe takes
you on the voyage of scale.
The
last week of January and the first of February have been times
of major disasters in NASA's manned space program. On January
28, 1986, the Challenger
shuttle
exploded on launch; on Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia
broke
apart over Texas as it was returning from orbit and a
ground-test of the Apollo
1 burned
on January 27, 1967, killing three astronauts.
January
24, 2011: For
an interesting discussion on some of the exotic possibilities
that might describe our Universe, you might find time to read
and listen to this short audio segment from National Public
Radio: A
Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist
January
22, 2011: On
today's Quirks and Quarks radio program, there was an
interesting article, Busting
Galactic Dust,
concerned with mapping the molecular/mineral forms of dust in
our galaxy. Our solar system formed from such dust and gases.
Dr. Peter Martin from the University of Toronto is using the
Planck
telescope which
was launched by ESA last year as the successor to the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to map the galactic dust. WMAP
obtained the “baby picture of the Universe” that I
showed in class last day. The Plank mission will provide even
better resolution of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and
so improve our understanding of the distribution of matter
during that first brief period (to 380000 years) following the
“Big Bang”.
January
20, 2011: When
discussing possible term-paper topics during last lecture, I
mentioned the Stardust Mission. NASA has released a news item on
Stardust (renamed Stardust-NExT).
Apprently,
through mid-December, a
swarm of small icy comets fell
into the Sun. These were observed
by
the SOHO
(Solar
and Heliospheric Observatory). You might explore the SOHO site
to watch for transits of Mercury and Venus near the Sun and for
other possible sun-grazing comets.
It
is now, perhaps, time to alert you to John Walker's “Your
Sky” site
which will help you find stars in the night sky. Soon we will be
discussing certain stars and it might be interesting for you to
familiarize yourself with our winter night sky.
January
17, 2011: SUS
Academia Week announcement.
Quirks
and Quarks
presented
an article on Jan. 15 concerning the Kepler Space Telescope's
discovery of Kepler-10b.
The
Younger
Dryas (~
12.9Ka) describes a relatively short cold period that followed
the initial melting of the Laurentia ice sheet about 15Ka. There
have been several suggestions that an asteroid impact might have
been the cause of the cooling: Nanodiamonds
do not provide unique evidence for a Younger Dryas impact
.
This paper argues against that proposition but another supports
the hypothesis: Geochemical
data reported by Paquay et al. do not refute Younger Dryas
impact event. In
resolution of the debate, it remains to find evidence of an
impact site corresponding to the time of the Younger Dryas.
The
essay question
January
13, 2011: The
Faculty of Science is holding its “Soup
and Science”
series
next week.
Later
in the course, we will be dealing with earthquakes, moonquakes,
marsquakes and starquakes. Yesterday, January 12, was the
one-year anniversary of the most damaging earthquake to have
occurred in the western hemisphere in a century. The Haiti-2010
event was
not the largest event we've seen but the life toll and injury
toll has never previously been equaled in the history of the
west. CBC-NN presents a documentary concerning some remarkable
stories of survival in the Port-au-Prince devastation; watch
“Pulled
from the Rubble”
in
its Passionate Eye series online.
January
11, 2011: It
has been almost 34 years since the launches of Voyager
1 and Voyager 2.
These probes obtained surface images and other data concerning
all the outer planets except for Pluto and many of the moons of
the larger planets. They continue to return data from the edges
of the Solar System. Quirks
and Quarks,
the CBC radio (88.5 FM band in Montreal) science news program,
paid Homage
to the Voyagers
during
its January 8 program.
The
Kepler Space Telescope
has
found its first rocky exo-planet, Kepler-10b. On the search for
other planetary systems: exoplanets.
We, today, have a tally of 517.
January
6, 2011:
Asteroids
and meteorites... The amino acids and sugars that are necessary
to the formation of DNA and life are found in meteorites
from space.
Most meteorites are probably fragments that fall into the inner
Solar System following possibly ancient collisions between
asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Dawn
Mission will
encounter one of the largest asteroids, Vesta, in August of this
year and then continue on to encounter Ceres, the largest, in
2014. Some asteroids cross Earth's orbit. The NEOP
(Near
Earth Objects Program) is obtaining data on all large objects
that might hit Earth.
January
4, 2011: The
Quadrantid
meteor shower
might
be visible tonight if the skies are clear.
December
19, 2010: First
news item of the course for those of you who have already made
visit.
A total lunar eclipse will occur coincident with the Winter
Solstice. While this does not make the spectacle in any way
unusual, the coincidence of an eclipse at solstice is unusual –
this the first coincidence since the 1500s. Total eclipse begins
at 11:41 p.m. PST Monday or 2:41 a.m. EST Tuesday, December 21.
The totality phase — when the moon is entirely inside
Earth's shadow — will last a little over an hour.
Newslink!
NASA
Eclipse page link!
News
and highlights archive – Winter 2010
May
12, 2010: The
exams were all graded and the grades submitted to Minerva on May
3. No one should have failed the course. Again, the exam was
overly difficult and consequently the course-average on the exam
was very, very low – less than 60%. Fairer grades were
generated as follows. Exam grades were multiplied by 1.2 as a
first step in generating fair grades. Then, for those who did
term work, the 30/70 division of term work grade and corrected
exam grade was applied. For those who wrote the exam for 100%,
the scaled (1.2x) exam grade was used. To this “raw
grade”, 2.25 marks were added so as to push enough
students (~17%) above the A/A- grade boundary. Then all grades
below 84.5% were further scaled by adding 0.3x the difference
(84.5 – raw grade) to each grade. This lifted the class
average grade across the two classes to about 75%. Some students
whose performance may have merited an F grade were awarded D
grades upon submission to Minerva because the exam was judged,
again, to be overly difficult and so unfair. The distribution of
grades awarded to students in this year's course accord well
with grades awarded in previous years. Next year, again, the
exam will be redesigned to fairer expectation.
April
18, 2010: The
library maintains copies of old exams:
http://www.library.mcgill.ca/video/schulich/eexams/
April
14, 2010: One
of your very bright colleagues discovered an error in the answer
key for the current quiz. The error has been corrected and
everyone who has done the quiz for their second time has had
their quiz and grade properly corrected. Also, for all students
whose grade was 20+ but who had only taken the quiz once, I had
them regraded as well. My judgement was that students who had
grades exceeding 20/30 might want to keep them and not do the
quiz again. I do, however, encourage you all to do the quiz the
second time – it can't hurt. There is no chance that your
grade will fall by doing again after you have done some further
studying.
April
5, 2010: A
large, Mw ~ 7.2, earthquake struck north-western Mexico near
Mexicali on Sunday afternoon. This strike-slip (or transform)
event occurred along the southern end of the transform margin
that is characterized through California by the San Andreas
fault system. There has been relatively little damage from this
earthquake even though it was very shallow and near centres of
population in Mexicali, Tijuana and San Diego, California.
Magnitude
7.2 - BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
April
2, 2010: While
the display might not be spectacular, it is said to be the best
viewing of Mercury for the next 70 years. At about 7:15PM, just
after sunset, Venus should become visible in the western sky at
a place somewhat above (a hand's width at arms length) and a
little left of that point on the horizon where the Sun had just
set. To the right, about 2 fingers width at arms length, Mercury
should become visible when the sky darkens enough. Mercury is
very hard to see, normally, because it is so close to the Sun.
The Venus-Mercury pair should be visible from tonight through
next week. It is not spectacular, but it is rare that we can see
Venus and Mercury together.
April
1, 2010: We
have but 3 formal lecture periods left. Today's lecture and that
of Tuesday, April 6 will be normal lectures but that of April 8
will address new material only during the first 20 minutes of
the course. Then, I shall play a video which tells you quite a
lot about the terrestrial planets and moons of the Solar System.
On April 13, in the Leacock 132 theatre between 1:00PM and
2:25PM, I shall be available to answer your questions.
I
have composed Quiz#5-review. It will be posted from Sunday
night, April 4 at 18h00. It will remain available to you until
April 22 at 09h00. You can do this quiz twice. Your second
submission will count. I suggest that you open the quiz for the
first time after the April 8 class and try all the questions.
This quiz will give you a fair model of what is expected for the
final. I suggest, then, that you do the quiz again after you
have studied for the final exam – perhaps on the weekend
before the final on April 22. Because you have two opportunities
to the do quiz, your grade for your second submission should be
very high. In helping you to prepare for the final exam, I have
included the 10 most poorly responded questions from last year's
final exam.
The
weather
prediction for the long weekend
is
for summer-like temperatures. Take at least one of the expected
warm day to enjoy the city and parks.
March
30, 2010: We
have only 4 lectures left to complete the course. We shall move
quickly. I ask you to read the Noteset to amplify some of the
stories I shall be telling you during these last lectures. On
April 13, I shall be available in this classroom (Leacock 132)
between 1:00 and 2:25PM to answer questions concerning the
course or the upcoming exam. For the moment, I post the
frontpage
from
the 2010-Winter exam. I encourage you to read the explanations
and instructions on this frontpage before entering the exam.
March
25, 2010:
Should
you want to challenge your understanding of the Universe and its
origins, the annual Anna
I. McPherson Lectures --- The Public Lecture--- presented by Dr.
David J. Gross Nobel Prize in Physics 2004, Director of UCSB's
Institute for Theoretical Physics will
be presented In Leacock 132 at 6:00PM tonight. Click
here for the advertising poster.
Professor Gross might be able to explain developments in String
Theory to those of us who are not theoretical physicists.
March
23, 2010: I
am again pressing the advertisement for programs in ESS (Earth
Systems Science) and EPS (Earth and Planetary Sciences):
Invitation
to our Earth System Science information session.
I
shall close our late afternoon session at 4:30 so that students
in the Otto Maass class might be able to attend something of the
Information Session. You can all attend the pizza and movie
session.
As
for previous quizzes, I post the Quiz#
4 questions
without
the full multiple choice of answers.
March
18, 2010:
Invitation
to our Earth System Science information session.
March
17, 2010: While
I was searching for an online version of the article concerning
the
chaotic character of planetary orbits,
I did happen across an interesting NASA site: NASA
Science for Researchers
.
You might, from time-to-time visit this site to learn something
about the science that the NASA programs are funding. Note for
the article on chaotic orbits, you will have to be connected via
McGill VPN or directly through the McGill domain.
March
16, 2010: The
SOHO LASCOM camera has captured a comet
falling into the Sun...
and a close-up
image.
You might also note the image of Mercury passing behind the Sun.
Another celestial event: Venus is now nicely visible in the
western sky just following sunset.
On
planetary orbits:
Properly, physics can
only deal with one simple orbital problem exactly. The orbital
positions of two point-mass bodies about each other in an
otherwise empty universe can be described as a closed-form
analytical equation. If the bodies are small enough, the
Newtonian approximation to this orbital equation is
asymptotically accurate. Practically, though, one must resort to
Einstein's Gravitation theory for the precisely accurate form.
This is the classical 2-body
problem. If
we introduce a third body, we cannot describe an analytical
closed form for the orbits. We often say that the 3-body problem
is analytically insoluble. The solution to the n-body problem is
impossible. So, what do we do in order to predict the positions
of the planets through time? We numerically integrate the
differential equations that relate all the forces acting on all
the bodies in our Solar System. Because we do this integration
with digital computers, we can only achieve an approximation to
the analytic solution because digital computers cannot describe
irrational numbers with infinite precision: we face an
accumulation of “round-off error” with increasing
time of prediction. In principle, we cannot know that the orbits
of the Solar System will remain stable for billions of years
into the future. Much could happen that is masked by the
inherent incompetence of digital computation for complex and
chaotic systems.
What
else is newsworthy? A relatively minor
earthquake
struck
central Los Angeles early this morning. Current
seismogram
from
the CMB site east of San Francisco.
March
11, 2010: A
strong
aftershock
to
the Chilean earthquake of February 27 rattled Santiago and
Valparaiso this morning. One might expect continuing
aftershocks, generally decreasing in magnitudes during the next
few weeks.
Recently,
a “new” type of supernova has been observed which
might be of a kind predicted theoretically to have been common
in the first few hundred million years following the Big Bang.
Pair-instability
supernova
arise
as the explosion of supermassive stars of the kind of those
first formed in the universe. It seems that in some small
disorganized galaxies, the materials available for the
construction of stars has little chemistry beyond H and He and
traces of Li and Be. Theory tells us that supermassive stars,
much larger than those that are forming galaxies like our own
today, form when there is little “metal” content in
the condensation. The mechanism for explosion is called
pair-instability for these; it seems that one has been observed.
March
9, 2010: The
third of five quizzes is now completed. I am presuming that
those of you who did the quiz and chose not to submit your quiz
for grading were telling me that you don't want quizzes counted
toward term work. This is the “method” I explained
(see Course overview) for you to tell me that you do not want
quizzes to count. Now, still and in spite of the WebCT's
multiple and annoying warnings, some of you may have intended to
submit your quiz but somehow submission failed for you. If
answers were saved, then it is possible for me to force
submission of those answers for grading and, therefore, for
count toward term work.
As
for previous quizzes, I post the Quiz#
3 questions
without
the multiple choice of answers.
On
this past winter: For the southern Ontario through Quebec City
corridor, the winter
of 2009-10
(counted
as December+January+February) was the 9th
warmest
on
record; nationally, it was the
warmest.
It was a nice winter!
Several
of the students in this class might be following courses
concerned with environmental and climate change. As we mentioned
in class, last day, CH4
(methane)
is one of the most important greenhouse gases in our atmosphere;
one molecule of CH4
captures
about 232x as much surface emitted 300K radiation as does a
molecule of CO2.
For climate modelling purposes, because CH4
is
purged from the atmosphere much more rapidly than CO2,
it is normally ascribed a climate warming potential factor of
about 21x CO2
for
any given atmospheric concentration. With that “correction”,
anthropogenic
CH4
is
normally thought to contribute somewhat less than ½ as
much warming as anthropogenic CO2.
Here is another
graph
showing
contributions to global-warming forcing. It is more troubling
that natural release of CH4
from
clathrates and arctic permafrosts is being accelerated by the
warming itself: The
Heat Over Bubbling Arctic Methane.
NOAA
(National
Oceans and Atmospheres Administration) has an elaborate program
for climate monitoring – Global
Monitoring Division.
Their CCGG
(Carbon-cycle
greenhouse gases) group publishes a continuing running tally of
those gases and aerosols that are most troubling to us:
graphical
data gallery.
March
4, 2010: The
Mars
Phoenix Lander
has
still not awakened following the long, cold Martian winter. The
Mars
Odyssey Orbiter
is
periodically checking for signs of life with Phoenix.
The
next quiz opens at 18h00 on Sunday, March 7 and will remain open
for your connection until Monday midnight, March 8. The material
covered will concentrate on what was covered in class during the
week before study break and during this past week until the end
of today's lecture.
March
2, 2010:
Welcome
back from “study
break”.
What has happened in these past two weeks? The big story is that
of the Chilean
Earthquake of February 27, 2010.
This Mw ~ 8.8 event is listed as the 5th
largest
event that has been recorded with seismic instrumentation. Each
full step in the Mw scale represents a factor of 32 in released
energy. The largest event that has occurred during the past 80+
years of instrumental recording took place along the same
fault-zone just to the south of this event on
May
22, 1960 (Chile Mw ~ 9.5).
This event released about 11x as much seismic strain energy as
did this most recent Chilean event. Saturday's Chilean event
released over 500x as much strain energy as did the much more
damaging January
12, 2010 Haitian
earthquake.
Also
on Saturday, night, there was an event, February
27, 2010, Brownsburg-Chatham, QC
that
some of you may have felt. The recent Chilean earthquake
released about 30 million times as much seismic strain energy as
did this Mw ~ 3.8 event but even this very small earthquake did
some minor damage to homes in the Brownsburg-Chatham area of the
lower Laurentians.
February
18, 2010: In
supplement to the Pluto link in the noteset, you might be
interested in seeing what is, so-far, our best imaging of Pluto.
NASA has launched a new Solar
Dynamics Observatory
(February
11) which is intended to study the dynamics of the Sun,
sunspots, the Sun's solar magnetic field as these affect Earth.
It will replace and improve upon much of what is being done,
now, by SOHO.
February
16. 2010: The
second quiz has now closed. Your grades should be available to
you. For some reason, more of you seem to have had technical
problems this time than last time. If you are going to do the
quizzes, do run the “Practice Quiz” a few times
until you are comfortable with the system. You can re-run the
“Practice Quiz” as often as you like. Here are the
questions that were asked on Quiz
#2.
Note that the next Quiz (Quiz #3) will be opened at 18h00 on
Sunday, March 7 and will close at 23h59 on Monday, March 8. See
the “Course overview” page.
February
15, 2010: The
Faculty office has just sent me a notice concerning how one
deals with conflicts during final exams. Examination
Conflicts . Tentatively,
our final exam is scheduled for Thursday, April 22 at 2:00PM.
February
11, 2010: While
I had intended to go deeper into the noteset for Quiz #2, I am
removing and replacing any questions that have not been covered
in class through to today's lecture which completes at the
bottom of page 47 (including the links to each of the planets).
The Quiz will open on Sunday night, February 14, at 18h00 and
remain open for you through to 23h59 on Monday night, February
15. See the February 2 posting below for brief instructions on
accessing the Quiz via WebCT. Note that the next online quiz,
Quiz #3, will be available on March 7.
On
May
25, 1961,
President J.F. Kennedy committed NASA to land men on the Moon by
the end of the decade of the '60s and return them safely to
Earth. The wonderfully successful Apollo
Program
achieved
that goal in July, 1969. Astronauts have not been back to the
Moon since 1972. There has been much speculation over the past
10 or 15 years concerning a return to the Moon and then on to
Mars. President G.W. Bush half-heartedly committed the US to
return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 but that project never
received the funding necessary to achieve the goal. On February
1, 2010,
President B. Obama essentially quashed the NASA manned Moon
program. In optimistic response to President Obama's budget
proposal, Charlie Bolden, NASA's chief budget administrator,
released this
document.
February
9, 2010: On
galaxies: the shape
and form of galaxies
evolves
over time as large galaxies incorporate smaller companions.
Galaxies are traditionally classified according to their shapes:
Hubble's
orignal tuning-fork classification.
Modern-day barred spiral galaxies like our Milky Way and spiral
galaxies like Andromeda have evolved into their present forms
during the past 5 or 6 billion years: click
here for
a diagram of galactic evolution. This Hubble telescope's
ultra-deep
field image
shows
over 10,000 galaxies in a field that covers only 0.000024% of
the sky. Check this
WikiPedia page
for
a list of those galaxies that are, in optimum seeing conditions
and for those of you with very good eyes, visible by naked eye.
A
nice review of the course narrative so far is available from the
Cassiopeia Project: Bang
to Sol.wmv
Note
the debate that starts this video piece: on
chirality.
Chirality and broken symmetry in nature is a fundamental issue
in many sciences. For example, why is the baryonic matter of our
Universe all “matter” rather than some mix of
“matter” and “anti-matter”?
February
4, 2010: The
question set asked on Quiz
1 have
been posted. In most cases the 5 choices have been suppressed
but the questions are essentially the same ones asked on the
first quiz
February
3, 2010:
Interested
in fundamental science at the layperson's level? Check out the
Cassiopeia
Project
for
explanations of Quantum Mechanics and other issues in physics,
biology, etc..
February
2, 2010: It
seems that the first online quiz offered through WebCT has gone
well. Two or three of you started the quiz but chose not to (or
failed to) submit it for grading and count. You can choose not
to have a quiz counted, of course, even though you have chosen
to do the quiz by “not
submitting”
it. If you choose to
submit fewer than three quizzes during the term, this signals me
that you do no want your quizzes graded and that you will be
writing your final for 100%. Alternately, you may choose to
submit a term paper on March 11 and that will signal me that
your quizzes are not to be counted toward term work while your
term paper will be counted. I suggest, though, that there is no
disadvantage that I can see in doing the quizzes and submitting
them as quiz grades tend to be higher than final exam grades. It
would be a very unusual situation for your quizzes to damage
your final grade. As well, in the doing of the quizzes, you have
an opportunity to review course materials on a bi-weekly basis.
Quiz #2 will be opened on Sunday, February 14 at 6:00PM and will
remain open to you until 11:59PM on February 15.
January
30, 2010:
Again,
referred to me by one of your colleagues: On
Spirit
January
27, 2010: One
of your colleagues has come upon a YouTube video that summarizes
the birth, evolution and death of stars; that video link is
here!
January
26, 2010: Opportunity
Rover has found a unique basaltic rock on Mars which has very
large crystalline structure indicative of slow cooling at depth
within the crust of Mars. The rock has been dubbed "Marquette
Island".
- "Space
is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely,
mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
down the road to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to
space."
Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The
Milky Way,
Atlas
of the Universe
.
January
21, 2010: I
was alerted to the problem of an incorrect link to the essay
question on the “Course overview” site. It has now
been fixed and it is now available here.
Topical
for today's lectures: How
the Sun Will Die: And What Happens to Earth
SOHO
(Solar
and Heliospheric Observatory)
is
continually watching the Sun.
There
is no danger that the Sun will suddenly explode out the regions
of the Earth but, still, from time-to-time there are explosions
of materials from the surface that do reach and affect Earth.
One
of your colleagues found an interesting article on how asteroids
themselves might be affected by close encounters with Earth, the
Moon and other planets: Asteroid
Seismology.
January
18, 2010:
Over
the next few weeks, Mars will be brighter in our night sky that
it will be at any time during the next several years. You can
find Mars relatively high in the SE sky at 22h00. Looking
directly south at 22h00, you should be able to see the 3 stars
that form the belt of the constellation Orion high in the sky.
You might orient yourself with these. Toward the upper left of
this belt, you should be able to see a bright reddish star,
Betelgeuse, and lower-left of this belt, an even brighter white
star, Rigel. If your view of the lower southern sky is not
blocked, you might note a very bright white star, the brightest
star that appears in our sky as seen from Earth, Sirius. To help
yourself find your way around the heavens, you might link to the
site “Your
Sky”
by
John Walker.
January
17, 2010:
Students
often ask about when they may see meteor showers. Unfortunately,
there isn't much to be seen during our term. The last
significant shower took place during the weekend before our
course commenced. I do recommend, though, that you put some time
aside in mid-August to lay out on the lawn in a dark place to
witness the Perseids. These are among the most reliable of our
meteors. Other reliable showers are those of mid-November, the
Leonids, and those of mid-December, the Geminids. Click
here for
dates of the major showers of 2010.
Comets
are seen more rarely than are meteors or meteor showers and,
again, the most recent information that allows for any forecast
of comets
visible
by the naked eye predicts none through the late winter. To be
seen by the naked eye a comet must have a "magnitude"
of about 4 or 5 or less. The brilliant comets of the recent
past, Hayakutake
and
Hale-Bopp,
reached negatve magnitudes.
One
of your classmates has directed me to this link: Experience
the Planets.
This course was originally designed as a science-culture course
for non-science students. The Solar System and our greater
Universe have long been a topic in the fine arts: painting,
sculpture, architecture, music, etc.. This site might open
science students in the course to how such topics are being
addressed in art-culture.
January
14, 2010: I
had promised to post a direct link to the WebElements
website
that provides much interesting information concerning the atomic
elements. You might find this site very useful as a supplement
to the descriptions of the elements found in the Noteset.
January
13, 2010: One
must not minimize the tragedy of the Port-au-Prince earthquake
of Tuesday, January 12. Still, with scientific dispassion, I
connect you to some technical information about this terrible
event: Haiti
– 2010-01-12.
You might also be interested in what a seismogram (a record of
seismic motions seen at a distant station, this one in
California) might look like for such an event: Seismogram
(CMB)
Concerning
the Mars Exploration Rovers, you might visit this Google site:
http://www.google.com/mars/
and
there click on the “Spacecraft” link tp see where
they landed. The Mars Phoenix lander is not indicated –
the map is just not up-to-date.
January
12, 2010: The
Noteset
is
complete, now, up to page 50.
In
August of 2007, the Mars
Phoenix lander
was
launched to Mars to try to find evidence of water ices in the
northern Arctic plains of Mars. It scratched the surface and
found water ice. With the arrival of winter, the Phoenix lander
became covered in CO2
and
water ice. NASA hopes that with the coming of the Arctic spring,
it may emerge and recover itself to continue digging the
surface. The Mars Phoenix lander had been preceded to Mars by
the Mars
Exploration Rovers,
Spirit
and
Opportunity.
They too sought evidence of a history of water on Mars in the
geological formations nearer the Martian equator. This latter
mission has wonderfully exceeded expectations with the two
rovers still exploring the planet's surface though Spirit
is
presently stuck in the sands of “Troy”.
January
6, 2010: Two
points: 1.
The Noteset
is
complete up to page 16 but no farther. I shall complete the
Noteset insofar as we will use it this term during the next week
or so. Page 16 will take us into mid-January. 2.
The video recordings of the lectures are now being posted during
the evenings following each class. Should you want to look to
past years, you might just substitute “2009-Winter”
and
“EPSC-200”
into
these URLs.
Julius,
who took this course 4 years ago, remembered me and us with a
suggestion for an interesting video journey from Earth's surface
to the edges of the Universe: click
here!
January
5, 2010: The
class begins... Note, there is to be no class on April 13...
Click
here for
the scheduling appendix. If there is an expressed interest from
the class, though, I shall make myself available, here, on April
13 to answer questions that may concern you as you approach the
final exam.
December
25, 2009:
2009
was the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th
year
following Galileo's observations of Jupiter through a primitive
telescope. In memory of that event, a cornerstone project of
IYA2009 was to develop an excellent while inexpensive telescope
that would allow you to do what Galileo did... and more. Check
out the Galileoscope.
December
20, 2009:
Several
times each week, I will be publishing links to news items that
are relevant to the subject of this course. Because many
students are concerned about our possible extinction by an
asteroid impact (Such events have happened in the past!), as a
first news item, I provide a link to the surveillance program:
the
international NEO
project.
One known object, Apophis,
that has been most worrying with respect to a possible impact
during the next century has been so carefully tracked that the
NEO now projects that it will miss impact with Earth on Friday,
April 13, 2029, when it comes no closer than 29,300 kilometres
(18,300 miles) above Earth's surface. Link here for impact
probabilities and the
orbital elements and diagram for Apophis.
From the perspective of Apophis, it is Earth that is the cosmic
hazard: click
here!
December
16, 2009: The course website is now under construction
for the 2010 Winter sessions.
August
25, 2009: The
deferred
exams have
been graded and grades have been assigned. Again, it seems that
the raw exam marks (average 57.5 with range 39.5 to 91) were not
very high. Even when the term-work grades were added (to obtain
cumulative average 64.7 with range 49.5 to 88.7), only one clear
A
grade
was produced. This was seen as an unacceptable distribution of
grades, and so grades were inflated so as to produce an average
and range of letter grades not very different from those
assigned in April. The minimum grade assigned was lifted to B-
.
All other grades, except for that one honest A
were
lifted by at least 2 letter grade places. This curving provided
the promised reference course average of 75%
and
B+
.
I suggest that it would be very risky to appeal for a formal
regrading of the exam. Your grade is probably better than you
should have expected. Everybody passed! In the future, I shall
have to compose easier exams...
August
18, 2009: Time-place
for the deferred exam:
EPSC
200 L/S 001/2
The Terrestrial Planets ENGTR
100 Aug 19,9 am
August
1, 2009: Concerning
the Deferred/Supplemental Exam:
Note
that the exam is tentatively scheduled for only one day: EPSC
200 L/S 001/2 The
Terrestrial Planets Aug
19 9 am That
is, the exam that had been scheduled for section 002 on the 20th
is
actually now scheduled for the 19th.
The one person who might have expected to write this exam should
receive notice of the change from the Examinations office. The
Final
August
Supplemental/Deferred schedule with room locations will be
posted the week of August 10th, 2009.
Some
comments concerning this exam:
The
April final exam graded very low (54% average) and so I am
relaxing the expectations for this deferred/supplemental exam.
That means, of course, that the exam will be different enough
that the previous curving formulas used to normalize grades for
the April exam will not be used for this exam. Still, I
will have good reference for a curving from previous exams and I
promise that any student who would have received A and A- grades
in previous years or on the April exam will also receive fair
grades on this exam. It will have fewer multiple-choice
questions (now 60) and 48 true-false questions. But,
it will have again, 5 questions that will ask for short (2 or 3
sentence) answers. It would be well for you to study to
previous exams and if you have access to your quizzes, to review
them. I think I managed to extract 3 of the quizzes from
WebCT and to post them via links on this "News and
highlights" course website page: See the April 21st
entry
below. The cover page of this deferred/supplemental exam can be
found here!
I
am not regularly in my office during the next two weeks but you
might try to call me there (514 398 3587) if you have questions
about the materials and exam that you don't feel you can deal
with yourself. Concerning materials, it is probably best for you
to try to address your own question through Google searches or
Wikipedia because you would surely incidentally run into other
materials that could be very useful in preparing for this exam.
May
6, 2009: Some
news rather than my continual bitching about grades... Here is
an interesting article in the current issue of Physics Today
that explains the search for and results of searches for
exoplanets.
May
5, 2009: On
WebCT, I
have now posted your ranking out of the 783 students who have
completed the course. Some of you might feel flattered that you
obtained one of the 10 best or 100 best grades in the course.
Some of you might understand that you have been treated with
remarkable generosity in grading if you are among the trailing
group with a 700+ ranking.
Note,
the ramp-scaling formula was previously reported incorrectly on
the detailed explanation of the grade curving, May 3, below. You
might have noted that by that formula, a student who graded 0
for the accumulated grade would have had the highest grade in
the course at 118.5 and the very best grading student only 100!
The spreadsheets used in the curving, however, made no such
error.
May
4, 2009: Through
some unknown confusion during the past week of managing
spreadsheets, some grades were not properly uploaded to WebCT
for Section 002 (Otto Maass section). The missing grades have
been checked and uploaded. If there are problems, now (14:21 May
4), please let me know. I think we have all of them resolved.
Note that Minerva only fixes grades between 10:00PM and 11:00PM
tonight.
May
3, 2009: I
have now applied my formulae to lift course grades out of the
gutter that they sat in. As promised during the first lecture,
now-adjusted course-average grades run at about 75% and about
18% of students in the course will receive a full A grade.
Several students may be assigned a D grade but following my very
generous grading scheme, there are no F grades. Those of you
with D (and even C) grades should count yourselves very lucky to
have run into our generosity. A detailed explanation of the
grading scheme is found here!
For
those of you who can't do the math, I am not prepared to explain
it further than by offering you this document.
Note,
some of you have paid so little attention to the course that you
don't seem to know that Quiz #4 was overvalued by a factor of
36/30. (See the March 17 entry on this page.) Quiz #4 grades are
scaled by 30/36 x the reported grade before the selection of the
4 best grades for averaging is made. I shall pay no attention to
any complaining student who hasn't understood this.
Students
have the right to petition for a regrading of the examination.
If you wish to have your grade reconsidered, you will have to
avail yourself of the formal procedure:
That
procedure is linked here.
I
refuse, absolutely, to negotiate grades.
April
30, 2009: As
soon as we can find out who the students were who masqueraded
with these student ID numbers on the exam, we shall be able to
post grades: 260309060 260260063 260228106 260011063 . These
students are not registered in the course; they may well be you
if you were incapable of filling out your Scantron sheet
properly.
April
29, 2009: I
am now adjusting the term-work contribution to the course. For
those who wrote an essay, the posted essay grade will be
adjusted upward by 0.7 marks to bring the average grade for
essays into accord with the quiz grades and the essay grade will
count (priority) for the term-work grade. For the quizzes, the
average of the 4 best quiz grades from however many you may have
written determines the term-work grade. Grades should be
available on WebCT and Minerva by Friday evening or Saturday
morning. Without some serious curving, the average grade on the
course for those who wrote the essay or quizzes and final would
only be about 65%. We will curve to obtain a fair course grade
distribution with a 75% average as promised. The curving will be
applied to the final exam component of the course as this is the
only part of the course that was completed by all students in
the class. You might still recognize that there was some slight
advantage in having written the essays or completing 4 quizzes.
April
28, 2009: Grades
are now dribbling in from the final exam. I'm sure that most of
you found the exam difficult, perhaps too difficult and too
long. I note the problem. At first glance, the average raw grade
on the final exam is only 54%. Now that means some very serious
curving of grades. The curving formula we have used in the past
several years will be applied again, first to the final exam,
then to the scaling of the term paper to accord with the quiz
average grade and then again overall. As difficult as the exam
seems to have been for many of you, it is unlikely that any F
grades will be assigned following the traditional curvings. The
curvings always most benefit the poorest grades. There will be
some D grades but there will also be a fair assignment of A
grades (typically about 18-20% of the class).
Grades
should be posted on Minerva by the weekend and the raw grades
for all elements of the course grade project made available to
you on WebCT on Friday. Very few of you have any reason to
worry...
April
21, 2009: Here
are three practice quizzes as completed during the term: Quiz#3
Quiz#5
Quiz#6
The
exam place and time: (extracted from the Examination Schedule)
- EPSC
200 001 The
Terrestrial Planets Apr 22 9
am Jensen
AAA -
CHOI GYM 101
-
EPSC 200
001 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen CHOK -
DESF GYM 305
-
EPSC 200
001 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen DESM -
FOR GYM 408
-
EPSC 200
001 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen FOR -
HEU GYM BLEACHERS
-
EPSC 200
001 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen HEY -
SIK GYM MAIN
-
EPSC 200
001 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen SIL -
ZZZ GYM STUDIO 1
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen AAA -
CHOI GYM 101
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen CHOK -
DESF GYM 305
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen DESM -
FOR GYM 408
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen FOR -
HEU GYM BLEACHERS
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen HEY -
SIK GYM MAIN
-
EPSC 200
002 The Terrestrial Planets Apr
22 9 am Jensen SIL -
ZZZ GYM STUDIO 1
-
-
I
expect that it will all be clear to you when you get to the
GYM... The Currie GYM is on the "north" side of
Penfield just "east" of University Street.
-
April
19, 2009: I
have (I hope) uploaded grades for the term paper to WebCT. They
should be available to you who wrote papers under the heading
"Essay".
April
17, 2009: It
is a major problem to obtain downloads of the term quizzes.
Still, I have (in two different formats) Quiz#3
and
Quiz#5
posted
on this site.
Concerning
the final exam... please pay attention to the "Notes and
materials" page (at bottom for study suggestions) and the
March 24th, 26th and 31st items in this newspage.
April
7, 2009: Yesterday's
earthquake centred on L'Aguila, Italy is the strongest to hit
the country in three decades. The tectonic issues that relate to
Italy are very complex: Italy
Tectonics .
A similar scale of earthquake is to be expected in Montreal
though with only a 2% probability in the next 50 years: Seismic
Hazard -- Canadian Cities
.
Was the L'Aguila earthquake predicted? A
city in ruins, a warning ignored?
April
4, 2009: Diana,
one of your coursemates, has found an explanation of the
difference between the solar day and the siderial day. This
might be helpful to you if this is an issue that has been
confusing you: A
day on Earth
.
March
31, 2009: McGill's
Library provides online access to many past exams -- eExam
howto.
The
UC-Berkeley Seismic Lab publishes on-line seismograms recorded
at various stations through California: Make
Your Own Seismogram.
I
am going to review some simple seismology as presented in the
Earth Physics course two years ago: Lecture-1-2
March
29, 2009: You
might check with the SOHO images: [ 56.6k
or
broadband
]
. Mercury is now passing behind the Sun (from right to left from
our perspective).
March
26, 2009: The
5th quiz will be available from Sunday (March 29) midnight
through Tuesday (March 31) midnight. It will cover materials
through today's lecture and to page 115.
Preparing
for the final... an e-mail to one of your colleagues...
If
you have been doing quizzes, then you have a good idea of what
is likely to be asked on the final. Questions from the quizzes
that you did not understand should have taken you back to notes
or lectures to strengthen your understanding of that issue. You
should know that a good guess is not necessarily evidence of
understanding. There will be questions on the exam that you have
seen and many, maybe most that you have not. The general area,
though, relating to any question on the final should have been
well addressed in class and/or notes.
There
is a lot of information, "factoids" if you like, but
it should be possible for you -- and that's the expectation --
to assemble it into a relatively coherent story that doesn't
require your memorizing an enormous list of factoids. For
example, you don't have to do every possible question in
mathematics in order to answer many questions. You extend your
understanding to a step beyond having memorized the answer.
We
don't fail anybody but, and I think I mentioned this is class,
we do try to overwhelm the memorizers to find those who have
come to some understanding of the materials. Those who
understand should do very well. Those who are obsessive
memorizers might do well also. Those who memorize enough will
pass with fair grades and almost nobody will be given an F
grade.
You
should also read the note at the bottom of the Notes and
materials course page...
March
24, 2009: The
final exam has been composed... Frontpage
instructions
Question
headings
March
22, 2009: As
the most obsessed of you prepare for the final exam, you might
find the first chapter of this on-line Google Book informative:
Space
Science: New Research, ed: Nick S. Maravell.
March
19, 2009:
Announcements:
Mercury
is open,
Departmental
Invitation
March
17, 2009: Those
of you who have completed the quiz will note that the score has
been improperly tabulated out of 30. It was my error that set
the quiz up so that a full mark is 36 rather than 30. My
intention was to scale the value of questions with multiple
answers. I did this scaling and then, additionally, the WebCT
system scaled those questions again. Marks for this quiz should
be seen as being out of 36 rather than 30 and so this quiz will
be scaled accordingly as 30/36 x the reported grade.
March
12, 2009: While
you are watching the Moon (see March 10 entry), you might also
look for an overflight of the International
Space Station.
The ISS
is
the biggest and brightest of all artificial satellites and will
be visible from the Montreal region during the next week or so.
Click
here!
During
next week, the Shuttle should be approaching the ISS and so you
might actually catch a visual of rendez-vous.
The
next quiz opens on Sunday night at midnight... through to page
76 of the Noteset... you might have to read a few pages forward.
For
relaxation while preparing for the quiz, you might look into
"The
Great Impact Debate".
March
10, 2009:
Tonight,
we have a "Full
Moon".
That is, the Moon is fully lighted on the near side facing
Earth. Over the next few days, I would like you to pay some
attention to the Moon's position and phase as it varies through
a week or month. For consistency, you might note where the Moon
appears in the sky at a particular and fixed time of night (say
8:00PM) and also note its phase.
I
will schedule the next (fourth) quiz for all day Monday and all
day Tuesday, next week. The quiz will open at 23h59 (midnight)
Sunday, March 15. The following (fifth) quiz will open on
Sunday, March 29 at 23h59. I will also open a review quiz that
might help in studying for the final exam and which will be
counted for those who want to count 4 quizzes and who have
missed one or two; this review quiz is not obligatory for your
term work grade but it might be useful in studying for the
final. It will comprise 30 questions covering the full course
and will be open for 10 days from Sunday, April 12 at 23h59
through to the start of the final exam, Wednesday,
April 22 at 9h00.
March
5, 2009: This
evening at 5:30, there is a lecture that might interest many of
you. In fact, for those desperate for a topic for an essay, this
might excite a topic. Dr Geoffrey A. Landis (NASA) will offer a
lecture entitled: Colonizing
Venus with Floating Cities . I
shall close our Otto Maass section at 5:00PM to allow those of
you in that section who would like to attend to get a good seat.
March
3, 2009:
Welcome
back from Study Week's holiday. Did anyone manage to see Comet
Lulin
last
Tuesday or Wednesday? For more on comets, see Gary Kronk's
Cometography.
It would seem that Lulin
is
an aperiodic comet following an almost parabolic orbit into the
inner solar system.
Before
the break, one of you asked me about December
21, 2012...
I expect nothing unusual to occur then, but...
I
expect that most of you who intend to write the current Quiz #3
have already done so. The extended open period ends at 23:59 (1
minute to midnight) tonight. Those of you who are writing the
term paper should note that it becomes due on March 12. So that
I don't lose them, I would like to receive your papers on that
day -- no earlier and no later.
You
may have read or heard on the news that there was a near-miss of
a collision of a small asteroid with Earth yesterday. 2009
DD45
passed
within about 65 000 km of Earth. This small asteroid (~ 40m) had
been well tracked and was known not to present any hazard to
Earth. An object of this size, though, could devastate quite a
territory on Earth. The Tunguska
event
atmospheric
impact of 1908 was thought to have been caused by an asteroid
or, perhaps, a comet of about this size. Another
link...
February
19, 2009:
Many
of you who are writing essays might like to start your research
explorations over the Study Week. Yesterday, I came upon two
papers that might spur some interest from some of you, one on
oldest
zircons on our Moon
and
another on the inevitable run-up
of CO2
in
our atmosphere and oceans. Note that access the full text of
these articles, you will have to be connected on the mcgill.ca
domain either directly or via VPN.
February
17, 2009: Our
next online quiz will be held from Saturday midnight, February
28 through to Tuesday midnight, March 3. During the period that
the quiz is open, I shall not answer questions that I regard as
being specific to the quiz or derived from knowledge of the
quiz.
The
quiz will address Noteset pages 32 through 44. There will be
some emphasis on the characters of the planets and moons of the
Solar System at the level described in the links in Section 4.2,
pages 39-41. A quick link to the source of that story is here!
It
is probably easier, though, to access the links from the Noteset
directly
while online.
Planning
to look for Comet Lulin during the Study Week? Sky
and Telescope
Magazine's
site can help.
February
12, 2009: A
remarkably improbable event occurred yesterday, the collision of
two orbiting satellites: BBC
story here!
"Space
junk"
is becoming a growing, though still small, hazard for orbiting
satellites. Even very small pieces of orbiting junk can destroy
a satellite because collision speeds can approach 50000km/hour.
This
morning, you may have heard an item on the news concerning the
Square
Kilometer Array
project.
Vicki Kaspi, of our Department of Physics was interviewed during
this brief story. Radio telescopes explore the sky with
wavelengths of the order of 1 - 10cm : the
electromagnetic spectrum.
The atmosphere blocks some of the spectrum: atmospheric
absorption.
The spectrum of solar
radiation.
The
JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory's) Solar
System Dynamics
site.
While we will return to this later in the course, it may be
useful to your understanding of the Solar System as we are now
discussing it in class.
February
6, 2009:
There
is a possibility that Comet
Lulin
will
be visible to the unaided eye in dark country skies early during
study week.
February
4, 2009:
While
it may seem just a little early to be warning you about the
final examinations in April, it isn't too early to inform you
about the procedures relating to academic and religious
conflicts during the final exam period. For information on
procedures, click
here! It
isn't uncommon that students in Kinesiology, Education and Music
face academic conflicts but, this year, only Orthodox Christians
and Baha'i would appear to face a religious conflict that would
prevent the writing of an examination: click
here! If
you do and your faith is not listed, you should begin the
processes to obtain an exemption.
February
3, 2009:
Everyone
should have had the opportunity to write and/or see the first
quiz. Subsequent quizzes will
not be repeated
but,
as we shall follow a new schedule, the excuses for not being
able to do a quiz should fall away to zero. It is not necessary
to do any particular quiz or, in fact, any quizzes at all.
However, should you want to do the quiz for possible grade or
just to see the questions, quizzes will be open for the 24 hours
of the Sunday and the 24 hours of the Monday following. That is,
the next quiz will open up at 12:00-midnight on Saturday
night/Sunday morning and close at 12:00-midnight on Monday
night/Tuesday morning. The next quiz opens at 24h00, February 7
and closes at 24h00, February 9.
The
Natures of Stars,
James Kaler. Also, see his Stars
page.
January
30, 2009:
Mary
alerted me to an interesting story that relates to the
observation of a special one among the extra-solar
planets.
January
29, 2009: A
couple of interesting video simulations concerning supernovae:
The
guts of a superstar
and
Flying
through a supernova's grave.
In the Leacock class, I couldn't play these. I discover that
with the latest download of Adobe
Flash Player,
I can. Upgrade to Flash, version 10. More about Cassiopea-A
.
January
27, 2009: It
has become clear that several students who chose not to write
the quiz for grade feel disadvantaged in not having seen the
last quiz. In the future, I would like you who are not writing
for grade to look at the quiz during the normal quiz times --
but,
this time only,
and because there are several students with arguably valid
reasons for having missed the quiz, I shall open a supplementary
quiz to all of those who missed it whether for grade or not
starting Friday at 2:30PM until Sunday at 6:00PM. I shall also
open this quiz to all students who properly wrote the Quiz #1
for a "review" but for those who have already
submitted a quiz, this review will not count or change your
grade.
January
26, 2009: One
of your colleagues has pointed me to a very interesting series
of videos that might be of interest to you: The
Elegant Universe (NOVA).
In
about 3 weeks, we will be discussing the orbit of the Moon and
eclipses... today, there was an "annular" eclipse that
was well visible in Indonesia: click
here! You
might also check out the NASA
Eclipse Web Site
and
note their story concerning today's eclipse. This turns out to
be a very poor year for eclipses, solar or lunar, to be seen
from Montreal or elsewhere in North America. However, for those
of you who might be in western China on July
22,
there is a good possibility of seeing a "total" solar
eclipse. Here is a map
of the "path of totality"
through
India
and
China
and
another
for
the western Pacific where you might be able to catch a warm
tropical island.
Are you a rich tourist? Eclipses are a tourist business and this
is your opportunity to see the longest totality this century:
click
here!
January
22, 2009: Students
who are registered with the OSD should bring your letter-form to
me so that I can assign you to the OSD on-line quiz rather than
to the general one.
In
our last lecture, we discussed what the Universe is made of:
About
matter.
Gaelle
Hortop (You may recall her visit to the class on January 8.)
asked me to post a notice of invitation to participate in the
Social Psychology studies: click
here!
January
18, 2009: I
received a request from Laura Drudi to advertise the 2009
Canadian Student Summit on Aerospace that
she is organizing at McGill.
January
17, 2009: I
cannot vouch for the site, nor for the security of the site
suggested by Ichiko below. I would suggest that you take some
care not to accept downloads onto you Windows computer if your
anti-virus guard is not completely up-to-date. You are probably
not vulnerable if you are running either Linux or Mac-OSX as a
normal user but even in these cases, it is probably always wise
not
to run your
computer in "super-user" or "administrative"
mode. I, for example, only run my computers as a simple user
without administrative privileges and then, when necessary, give
myself these privileges. Even Windows is not very vulnerable if
you are not running with administrative privileges -- create a
user account for yourself with "limited privileges"
for security.
Ickiko's
e-mail: ...
found a really cool show call "The Universe" from the
history channel.
I will send you a link where you can get the
best quality video, but you need a video player called
"Divx."
The list of all the shows are listed below
the video from dark matter, terrestrial planets to
Supernovas.
This is the
link:
http://www.ninjavideo.net/video/16874
I
hope you will enjoy!
Sincerely, Ichiko
January
15, 2009: If
you dress warmly, these clear cool nights offer a wonderful view
of the sky. Toward this purpose, you might download the
excellent commercial programs “Starry
Night”
or
“Distant
Suns”.
The free codes “Your
Sky”
by
John Walker or “Sky
and Telescope”
magazine's,
“Interactive
Sky Chart”
are
just about as useful for the needs of this course. Next
Tuesday's lecture deals with the scale of the Universe and the
methods by which we have determined its “size” and
“age”... The Atlas
of the Universe
offers
a nice graphical perspective on scales. The Milky
Way site
offers information about the scale of our galactic home.
MicroSoft
has announced Worldwide
Telescope,
a virtual planetarium for touring the sky and universe. This
initiative follows the online Google services: Sky
and
Moon
that
started with Earth
(or
via Google
Map)
and Mars.
Other nice codes available for download for many other operating
systems: Celestia
and
KStars.
January
13, 2009: An
important announcement:
For
two reasons, I would like to delay the first on-line quiz to
January 23. The first reason is that, while I am receiving some
help from the WebCT group, I do not yet have any way of
downloading paper copies of the quiz that might be used for OSD
students. The second reason is that Thursday through Saturday is
expected to be the coldest period in southern Quebec in the past
several years. In St.
Sauveur,
the weather station closest to my home, the temperature is
predicted to fall to -36C on Friday morning. Even our northern
world doesn't work very well at -36C. We are almost sure to face
power failures and shortage and with power going on and off, it
will be problematical to do the quiz as intended.
Recent
research now argues for black
holes to precede galaxy formation,
offering the gravitational centre about which primordial gases
and primitive stars begin to assemble.
January
9, 2009: For
those who still might be interested in participating in the
social psychology studies, you can enroll at this website: click
here!
January
8, 2009: A
request from one of your colleagues:
Hi
Professor Jensen,
I realize that you asked us to use a
different e-mail address for the terrestrial planets course but
i was unable to locate it. I'm in the 1pm class and I was
wondering if for the quizzes you could post them from Friday to
Monday so that students are able to write the quiz with out any
time discrepancies. This is how it worked with our biology
course last semester and it seemed to work really
well.
Thanks,
MM
P.S. it also gives students
who missed a Thursday class time to catch up on the lectures
- A
second news item:
If
you login to this news site today, you can still see Mars
passing behind the Sun (toward the right -- moving more slowly
than the background stars) in the SOHO images: [ 56.6k
or
broadband
]
and within a few days, Mercury will pass between Earth and the
Sun and so be visible. In early February, Venus will pass across
the field of view between us and the Sun.
January
6, 2009: Answers
to the question posed in today's class: Find an explanation the
orbit of the Earth and our closest proximity to the Sun
here.
Find an animated explanation of seasons here.
January
5, 2009: The term begins...
January
3, 2009: Five
years ago, today, the Mars
Rover,
Spirit,
landed in Gusev Crater on Mars. It was designed to continue its
experiments during 90 days. After five years, Spirit and
Opportunity,
the twin rover that landed later in January, 2004, are still
returning data to us. These are among the very most successful
of all space mission. Click on these links for the NASA Mars
Exploration Rovers
mission
site and Steve
Squyres'
(the
mission's principal investigator) information site.
January
2, 2009: A
news item to preview the course... A small asteroid, 2008
TC3,
crashed into Earth in Sudan on October 7, 2008. This asteroid
had been tracked by the international NEO
project
and
its impact was no surprise. Among the near Earth objects that we
know may hit Earth in the next century, 2007
VK184
presents
the greatest risk: 3.4 chances in 10000 of hitting Earth over
the next century and 3.3 chances in 10000 of hitting Earth on
June 3, 2048. If it does hit Earth, it will produce an impact
energy equivalent to a 146MT thermonuclear bomb. This is almost
three times the energy released in the largest nuclear test ever
conducted on Earth, the Tsar
Bomba.
News
and highlights – Summer Session 2008
June
5, 2008: The final exam has been graded. The highest
grade obtained on the final turns out to be 94/100 but the
lowest is only 6/100. I shall check into the problem that might
have arisen for this person – it may be that the ScanTron
system could not read your bubbles. However, if you know that
your exam was so very poor, get in touch with me by e-mail. The
next lowest grade is 37/100 and with scalings and curvings and
addition of the essay and midterm grades, that person probably
is not at risk of a failing grade. Essays and midterms have not
been added into these grades yet.
Now
(16h18), tenatative grades have been compiled according to the
promised formula (in order of priority): 1. Essay/35 +
Exam/65; 2. Midterm/35 + Exam/65; 3. Exam/100. One
student wrote the essay and the midterm – the slightly
better midterm grade was used in his/her case. Grades were then
curved, first by adding 2 marks to everyones grade and then by
scaling those whose grades fell below 84.5 according to this
formula: Raw grade + (84.5 – Raw grade) x 0.2 This formula
most benefits those with the lowest grades while keeping the
integrity of honest A and A- grades. The course grade average
becomes 75.5% and grade median, 75.8%, by these machinations and
that's exactly where we like it: a course average of B+. No one
was assigned a D or F grade. These calculations and grades will
be checked for accuracy before grade are submitted to the
Minerva system.
May
31, 2008: I
have contacted the NCS Windows Infrastructure group who is
responsible for the lecture recordings and was promised that
they would have the glitch fixed by yesterday. It must be more
of a problem than they had foreseen. In replacement, I suggest
that you look to the last two lectures from last winter's
course: The course lectures from last
winter's course are available here:
- Section
01:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2008-WINTER&Course=EPSC-200-001
-
Section
02:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2008-WINTER&Course=EPSC-200-002
May
28, 2008: I
was able to download the questions
from
the WebCT online quiz of Friday, May 23, but for some reason, I
can't attach the multiple-choices of answers. Because the quiz
is attached to the records of those who submitted it, I am
having trouble opening up the quiz. I could reconstruct it but
that would take some time. Still, the questions might be useful
to you even though the choice of answers offered for that exam
are not given. The questions largely define the materials
anyway. So here is what I can offer you just now: Questions
from the online midterm
May
27, 2008: The
final exam is scheduled for next Monday, June 2, 2:00-4:00PM in
Leacock 132. Here is a copy of the frontpage
of
instructions for the exam. For those students who have asked for
special arrangements, a different exam will be given in Room
211, FDAdams Building on Friday, May 30, 2:00-4:00PM. The
frontpage of the different
exam
for the special session on Friday describes that exam's format.
May
25, 2008: The
Phoenix
Mars Lander
touched
down this evening at about 19h43.
May
24, 2008: You
might look at the SOHO-Lascom
site.
You see Venus passing behind the Sun in its orbit and, if you
look carefully, you will see a comet falling into the Sun from
the bottom of the image.
You
might also note the group of stars passing left-to-right above
the Sun. These are the Pleiades,
a group that is easily visible in mid-winter high in the sky to
the east of the constellation Orion; the bright star crossing
from lower left is Aldebaran,
a clearly reddish coloured star that is easily seen in
mid-winter.
May
22, 2008: The online midterms are posted. Those students
who asked for a Thursday session can start their session anytime
between 2:00PM, directly after class, and 5:30PM. I shall be in
my office (514 398-3587) until 3:30PM and, then, on and off
until 5:00PM in case in case you run into some difficulty. Call
me if you have a problem and, if your call didn't get to me,
then e-mail me. We should be able to work something out if you
haven't been able to access the quiz.
The
Thursday midterm will be a trial run for tomorrow's midterm.
Tomorrow's (Friday) midterm for those who haven't asked for the
Thursday session will be open at 12:00 noon and continue through
to 5:00PM. You have 50 minutes to complete the 35 questions –
the 50 minutes begins when you click on “Begin
Assessment”.
May
17, 2008: The
Phoenix
Mars Lander
is
scheduled to set down on Mars on Sunday evening, May 25. You
might watch NASA-TV
during
the landing.
May
15, 2008: I am expecting essays from those of you who
have chosen to write them on Tuesday. I encourage those who are
going to do the online quiz next Friday to visit WebCT and try
the practice midterm in order to become familiar with the
system. The Friday online quiz will be time-limited to 50
minutes and will comprise 35 questions. I'll open the window for
the quiz Friday at 1:00PM through to Friday 2:30PM. For those
who cannot do it during that period (those who have asked with
good excuses), I shall open it again during a period that should
work for all of you. Remember, you can put all your eggs in the
final exam basket...
May
14, 2008:
Today's
class in the classroom is to be cut short so that we may taking
a little walking trip to the lower campus and then up Mount
Royal. For those interested, I attach a link to some field notes
compiled for a similar excursion in 2000 by Venetia Bodycomb:
Click
here! I
also refer you to the similar story of Mt. St. Hilaire where
McGill's beautiful Gault Nature Reserve comprises much of the
mountain: Click
here!
May
13, 2008: MicroSoft
has announced Worldwide
Telescope,
a virtual planetarium for touring the sky and universe. This
initiative follows the online Google services: Sky
and
Moon
that
started with Earth
(or
via Google
Map)
and Mars.
Other nice codes available for download for many other operating
systems: Celestia
and
KStars.
May
12, 2008: A
major earthquake hit near Chengdu, Sichuan, China earlier today.
The USGS
Earthquake Hazards Program
reports
all significant earthquakes (greater than magnitude 4) that
occur on Earth and many of the smaller ones that occur in North
America.
A
service of the UCal
Berkeley seismic lab
posts
current seismograms from their digital network online.
The
Earthquakes
Canada
site
shows current ground shaking at dozens of sites in Canada. Here
is the MNT
station's
recording (at Collège Jean de Brébeuf, corner
Decelles and Côte St. Catherine).
The
weather forecasts for the week look good. Wednesday looks like a
very fine day in replacement of the rain-risk of Thursday. As I
usually do during the Summer Session version of this course, I
shall lead those of you who would like to join me on a short
"field trip"... We would shorten the Wednesday, May 14
class to leave at 12h45 and start with a short visit to the
lower campus and to the Redpath Museum before climbing Mount
Royal. For weather information: click
here!
Bring
some walking shoes; I won't wear heels.
Interested
in some field notes compiled for a similar excursion in 2000 by
Venetia Bodycomb? Click
here!
May
11, 2008: There
are some aspiring astrophysicists in this class. The son of one
of my now-retired departmental colleagues is among the three or
four most exciting theoretical physicists in the world today.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, who is still in his early 30s, is Professor
of Physics at Harvard. He holds one of the most prestigious
posts in the world of physics. I knew Nima when he was just a
10-year old kid and while it was clear that he was brilliant, I
could not have predicted that he would shine so brightly. For an
essay topic for the aspiring astrophysicists, I suggest that
they might virtually attend Nima's presentation to the Perimeter
Institute last November via Google Video: click
here!
May
10, 2008: Apparently,
you can log into the WebCT homepage for the course with this
URL: https://mycourses.mcgill.ca/webct/logon/828686006011
May
9, 2008: Accommodating
the music students who might be attending the school at Le
Domaine Forget de Charlevoix:
e-mail me...
May
8, 2008:
Finding
your way around the night sky:
Given
a clear night, you might try to familiarize yourself with some
of the stars that we have discussed. Toward this purpose, you
might download the excellent commercial programs “Starry
Night”
or
“Distant
Suns”.
The free codes “Your
Sky”
by
John Walker or “Sky
and Telescope”
magazine's,
“Interactive
Sky Chart”
are
just about as useful for the needs of this course. The next
lecture deals with the scale of the Universe and the methods by
which we have determined its “size” and “age”...
The Atlas
of the Universe
offers
a nice graphical perspective on scales. The Milky
Way site
offers information about the scale of our galactic home.
More
on Galaxies: Andromeda/M31,
Triangulum/M33,
Whirlpool/M51,
Southern
Pinwheel/M83
;
our Milky
Way might
look like M83. A MilkyWay
Panorama.
The
distant future of our Universe: See the article on Page
8 by
Fred C. Adams and Gregory Laughlin. Also for a nice description
of marker events in the evolution of the Universe, see this PBS
site: “Universal
Time-line”.
May
7, 2008: As
they are continually monitoring its orbit, NASA's Near
Earth Object Program
have
determined the risk that an asteroid discovered in the late
autumn of last year, 2007
VK184 ,
has about 3 chances in 10 000 of hitting the Earth in the next
century. Currently, this is that object being tracked that shows
the highest cumulative probability of impact with Earth. For an
animated diagram of its orbit, click
here!
May
6, 2008: In
the next few months, an amazing story about some rocks found at
Porpoise Cove in northern Quebec should hit the news. These
rocks may be the oldest known rock on Earth. Here are some
images of Porpoise Cove: [ I
|
II
|
III
]
May
5, 2008: Mee-Hye Seong has arranged for bound, printed
versions of the course noteset. They are available at CopieNova,
Sherbrooke St. at Peel, for $11.57 or $8.42 with a membership
card. This is a very good “deal”. The noteset is
identified as Jensen-200. Thank you Mee-Hye!
May
2, 2008: I
have posted the "essay
question"
and explantion.
For
a little diversion, you might look at these videos concerning
voyages to the Moon:
- La
voyage dans la lune
--
thought to be the first science fiction film,
-
The
Flight of Apollo 11
– the
record of the first actual landing by Neil Armstrong and “Buzz”
Aldrin on the Moon on July 20, 1969.,
-
Apollo
16 –
Nothing
So Hidden (
part
1 and
part
2 )
– a video about the Apollo 16 mission, April 21, 1972.
May
1, 2008: The lecture of May 1 was not recorded but,
starting on May 5, the lectures will be available online the day
following the lecture:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2008-SUMMER&Course=EPSC-200-001
Note
that May 19 is a holiday and the essays, then, become due on May
20.
The
image of the Moon in the upper right-hand panel shows a series
of images centred on the Moon during one month of its cycle.
This apparent motion of the Moon is called “libration”.
April
22, 2008: I am just now beginning to organize the Summer
Session course website... Watch for completion within the week.
News
and highlights – from Winter 2008
April
22, 2008: I hope that you all found the exam fair and
that you feel that you did what you knew you could do on it.
Until last night at 11:00PM when I went to bed, I believe I had
responded to every e-mail sent to me concerning questions about
the material and exam. I failed to answer Daniella's last two
e-mails at 1:02AM this morning. Sorry Daniella. Graduating
student grades will be submitted in time for graduation. Grades
from the multiple-choice section should be available for
everybody in about 1 week. These grades and the essay grade, if
you wrote one, will be used in final grade estimation that has
been promised to you. The estimation will be based on historical
relationships between these grades and the final grade obtained
in the course, particularly in 2007.
As
far as I know, all essays have been graded and are available for
pickup from an open filing cabinet outside my office door at
#130D, Frank Dawson Adams Building. The larger artworks and
booklets might be held in my office, so knock on my door or
e-mail me or telephone me (514 398 3587) to make an appointment
to receive it.
April
21, 2008: I have entered all the known grades and I
believe that every essay has been graded. The marks shown are
those that you have won that will be applied as either 20% or
35% toward the course grade. Essays will be considered in a
possible grade estimation – the estimation formula is not
established yet but will be based on the experience of past
years. If we are forced into estimation because the TA strike
has hung on too long, we will try to establish a correlation
between grades on the essay and on the parts of the exam that
can be graded by May 10 (the multiple-choice part will be graded
within a few days) and the equivalence to the final grade as
obtained by students in previous years. The grade estimation
will not be a simple up-scaling of the grades obtained in the
partial exam plus essay. All exams will eventually be graded and
grade corrections will be made for all those students for whom
their estimated grade was poorer than their actual grade. No one
who receives an estimated grade will have that grade reduced.
All 123 graduating students' exams will be fully graded and
their grades will be fixed.
As
of 5:00PM today, I still don't have all the essays returned to
me though the grades are properly listed. I shall collate them
into alphabetical order tomorrow and you should, then, be able
to pick them up in the late afternoon or on Wednesday.
April
20, 2008: I am still awaiting about 100 grades from the
essays. I should have them tomorrow. Also, for about 25
students, mostly in Section 001, there were some incorrectly
reported grades. If your grade was very low (say 23/35 or less),
it may well be among those that were mis-reported. You might
check again.
Nicole,
a student from my course 2 years ago sent on a link to a cartoon
that
even answers questions that could well appear on the exam.
April
18, 2008: I am beginning to enter grades (after noon
Friday) for the essays into WebCT. Be a little patient. I have
negotiated with one TA who is holding back papers that were
already graded before the strike was called to return them to
me. I'll have those grades up on Monday and, again, I apologize
for continuing delays. That will leave about 25 essays ungraded
and I am negotiating to get those back so that I can grade them
over the weekend. The strike requires a little patience from all
of us...
April
17, 2008: I am still trying to get back a few ungraded
essays from the TAs who apparently decided to delay doing
anything until the strike saved them from the task. I shall post
the essay grades I have tomorrow morning. Sorry for the long
delay. Those whose grades appear tomorrow on WebCT can receive
the essays. An average grade is about 27.5/35 (78.5%) so-far and
I believe no paper has been graded below 23/35 (66.5%). I expect
that anyone who has written an essay and who attends the final
exam will quite easily pass the course. Good luck on Tuesday....
April
16, 2008: Tiffany
has asked me to ask if there are any students who would like to
form a study group: tiffany.ziadie@mail.mcgill.ca
Eric
sent me a link to this picture
of the space debris
orbiting
Earth.
April
13, 2008: Not all essays have been graded and, for those
that have been, grades haven't been collated to bring the
grading standards to the same level among graders. That means
that I cannot keep my original promise to provide you with your
grade on April 14. Still by midweek, a good number of grades
will be available and posted and essays will be available for
pick-up. The AGSEM strike has had some little effect on our
processes but, overall, the real effect will only be one of some
delay.
April
8, 2008: AGSEM, the accredited union of the Teaching
Assistants of McGill, has called a labour action – a
strike. The strike will have some effect on the operation and
grading of exams. In this course, we shall endeavour to make
sure, first, that all final grades for graduating students are
submitted in time for their graduations. For students who are
not graduating this spring and if the strike continues for more
than another month, a lower-bound grade estimate based upon the
parts of the exam that will have been computer graded and the
grades from the essays for those of you who wrote essays will be
assigned. When the strike ends and the grading of the short
answer and bubble-chart question is finally completed, these
estimated grades will be adjusted. In this adjustment, no grade
will be decreased.
All
students are encouraged to complete course evaluations –
an annoying pop-up reminder will appear every time you log in
through Minerva or, as I am told, to your official McGill
e-mail.
April
4, 2008:
Fiona
Williams has alerted me to the most amazing event on the Sun's
surface: a
tsunami!
Thank you, Fiona.
April
3, 2008: Attend
class today for a brief review of the expectations for the final
exam. Look to the bottom paragraphs of the “Notes,
materials”
page
for last year's exam links and suggestions.
Watch
seismic motions in Montreal (and at other Canadian seismic
stations): Earthquakes
Canada's Seismogram viewer.
For
recent seismic events as recorded by the Berkeley Digital
Seismic Network, click
here!
March
27, 2008:
Over
the next few weeks, it might be worthwhile to have a look
outside to the north around midnight. You might see some
displays of aurora borealis. Sunspots
have broken out on the Sun
and
usually eruptions of plasma are ejected from the Sun during high
sunspot activity. It might be interesting to watch the Sun on
the SOHO
and
LASCOM
sites.
On
Thursday, April 3, I shall spend about half the class describing
the character of and expectations for the final exam.
March
24, 2008: Matt
Belitsky has suggested two very interesting Google sites: Sky
and
Moon.
These add to the series that started with Earth
(or
via Google
Map)
and Mars.
Essays
are in the process of grading. I can only reasonably ask TAs for
20-25 hours per week to be devoted to this task and can only
give similar time myself to the task. It will take almost 3
weeks before essays are graded and grades brought into accord
among the various graders and then posted on the course WebCT
site. Be patient. You should receive grades and your essays
should be returned by April 14.
March
18, 2008: Essays are due today. As always, we offer a
1-day grace period and essays received in Room 238, FD Adams
building by 5:00PM tomorrow (i.e. March 19) will be deemed to
have been “on time”. Following that time, one half
mark (of 35) will be deducted each additionally late day.
Recall
the news item of March 7. We have no class on Thursday. The
Thursday schedule is replaced by that that would normally follow
next Monday which is a McGill holiday. Try to enjoy this 4-day
holiday. It is the last before the final exams. Thank you to the
Christians for the holiday. It is too bad that our legalistic
traditions have yet not spread benefit of everyones holidays to
all of us.
March
13, 2008: If
you managed to pay attention to the January 9th
entry
on this page, you would know that we are going to review the
2006
Summer Session midterm
today.
A second previous quiz for review too: 2007
Winter Session midterm.
Still
stuck for an essay??? You might start here: Kissing
the Earth Goodbye in About 7.59 Billion Years
One
of your colleagues has asked to make a brief presentation before
class: click
here if
you miss it in class.
Marth
10, 2008: It
is getting very late to be looking into an essay topic but if
you have left it this late, perhaps the Astrobiology
Lecture by Dr. Carl Pilcher
would
stimulate you.
March
7, 2008: Attention U0 and U1
students...
McGill
doesn't use the Julian calendar like the rest of the western
world. For example, what many of you believe to be March 24 will
actually occur on March 20 as marked on common calendars. That
means that our March 20 class will not be available. Remember,
though, that following the migrated March 24, the next day
actually becomes March 21. For those of you who celebrate Easter
on the calendar's 24th, note that McGill's calendar
does not apply off-campus.
March
6, 2008: Landslides
have been photo-imaged near the north pole of Mars: click
here!
The
south polar region of the Moon has been imaged by radar
reflection from Earth: click
here!
Look
at the first
animation
on
this site. You see an animation of the sky-image of the moon
during the equivalent of one full cycle of its orbit about
Earth. You should note that the image has been obtained at Full
Moon during many successive Full Moon phases and then assembled
into an incrementing moving image. Properly, each image is
separated by one lunar month. The image is centred exactly on
the centre of the Moon. The motion you see in the movie shows
the "libration
of the moon".
March
5, 2008: Several
students in the class might be facing religious observational
conflicts with the final exam on April 22. You are responsible
for applying for a resolution for the conflict before March 14.
I will be asked to set a different and separate examination on
another day. I will be informed of that day and when I know of
it, I shall inform the class via this page. See the McGill
Policy on Conflicts
.
While
I can't recall the actual complexities involved in applying for
an accommodation of a conflict, I do recall that students have
found some help in the issue in the past from the McGill
Chaplaincy Service
.
March
4, 2008: Welcome back. I hope that you are full of
energy, now, following your week of rest.
I
have been asked to show a video during today's class. I have
chosen one that I received from NASA at last December's AGU
concerning the New
Horizons
mission
to Pluto. While I can't help those of you who will not be able
to attend this class to see this video at another time, I do
know that it can be found on YouTube in 5 parts: Passport
to Pluto
parts:
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
. Note, this video is more than 2 years old. New Horizons was
launched on January 19, 2006 and is expected to encounter Pluto
on July 11, 2015. Last March, “she” made an
encounter
with Jupiter
during
which the imaging systems were tested before continuing on her
way to Pluto and beyond.
For
those of you who are going to write an essay,
it is due on March 18!
February
21, 2008: Today's
lecture will concern a review of the lunar eclipse of the
evening of February 20 and a showing of the video “Most
of the Universe is Missing”....
A
colleague, referred me to some interesting videos, now in the
public domain, that might interest you concerning the Moon:
- La
voyage dans la lune
--
thought to be the first science fiction film,
-
The
Flight of Apollo 11
– the
record of the first actual landing by Neil Armstrong and “Buzz”
Aldrin on the Moon on July 20, 1969.,
-
Apollo
16 –
Nothing
So Hidden (
part
1 and
part
2 )
– a video about the Apollo 16 mission, April 21, 1972.
February
19, 2008: The
lunar
eclipse
we
have been waiting for starts tomorrow night at 8:43PM EST. Given
clear skies, we should be able to see the whole duration from
Montreal. I would like you to pay attention to the eclipse,
noting its progress, especially as it begins and ends while
trying to relate what you see to the motion of the Moon about
the rotating Earth. For explanations about eclipses, you might
visit MrEclipse
or
the Yahoo!
news
page.
You might also note that there was an annular
solar eclipse on February 7
though
it was only visible in the far-southern hemisphere. You might
consider how this solar eclipse might relate to the lunar
eclipse of February 21 (in UT); that is, why the 14-day
separation between the two events. Tomorrow's weather
is
“iffy” though more likely clear in the late evening
than earlier in the day.
February
14, 2008: I
remind you of the lecture, this evening, by Prof. George Smoot:
click
here!
.... and of another lecture that might well interest many of you
by Prof. Theodore Shepherd of the University of Toronto: click
here!
Some
images from Porpoise Cove: 1
2
3
February
12, 2008: News
story about the discovery of a very young galaxy: click
here!
On a very distant cluster: click
here!
February
11, 2008: The
tentative
examination schedule
has
been posted. Our exam is scheduled for April 22 at 9h00. There
will be some conflicts;
you should take care to inform the Enrolment Services as soon as
possible. Students
who have conflicts but are not notified of academic conflicts by
March 1st, must complete an Academic
Conflict Form [.pdf].
The completed form must be submitted to the Enrolment Services,
room 205, James Administration Building by Friday, March 14th.
I
had some computer problems during the 13h00 lecture in Leacock;
if you are attending the course online, I suggest that you link
to the 16h00 session.
February
7, 2008: The
Annual
Anna McPherson lecture series
brings
in Nobel Prize winning physicists to give a public and a
scientific lecture. This year's lecturer is George
Smoot of
University of California, Berkeley & Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory
January
31, 2008: Again, a student has asked me to ask you to be
quieter during class . At the podium, I don't hear the noise
that seems to be bothering other students. Also, let me suggest
that class noise is not really very noticeable nearer the podium
and students who want to concentrate during lectures might find
sitting closer to be a solution. I'll turn up the microphone
today, as well. I do tend to run it at low volume.
Some
newly published photos
from
Mercury Messenger...
January
28, 2008: 2007-TU24's
closest approach to Earth occurs Tuesday morning: 538,000
kilometers (334,000 miles), from Earth on Jan. 29 at 3:33
a.m. Eastern time.
What
is the Universe made of? About
matter.
January
24, 2008: Ali
Gilani, one of your classmates, proposes to form a course group
to support the SETI@home
project.
The goal of the project is to listen for extra-terrestrial
communication signals. Much computing power is required for this
task and your computer could contribute when it is doing nothing
else. Ali proposes to create a group name EPSC200
to
which you could register upon joining the project.
Eric
St-Pierre suggested an interesting news item that is relevant to
our current place in course: Smith's
Cloud.
Melanie Bodi suggests an interesting National
Geographic (Space) site.
More
on Galaxies: Andromeda/M31,
Triangulum/M33,
Whirlpool/M51,
Southern
Pinwheel/M83
;
our Milky
Way might
look like M83.
January
22, 2008: The
next couple of lectures deal with the scale of the Universe and
the methods by which we have determined is “size”
and “age”... The Atlas
of the Universe
offers
a nice graphical perspective on scales. The Milky
Way site
offers information about the scale of our galactic home.
The
distant future of our Universe: See the article on Page
8 by
Fred C. Adams and Gregory Laughlin. Also for a nice description
of marker events in the evolution of the Universe, see this PBS
site: “Universal
Time-line”.
Some
images from Mercury
Messenger...
thank you Marzieh.
January
17, 2008: During
the next couple of weeks in the course we shall be discussing
stars and galaxies as we learn something about the age and
space-scale of the Universe. Given a clear night, you might try
to familiarize yourself with some of the stars that we shall be
discussing. Toward this purpose, you might download the
excellent commercial programs “Starry
Night”
or
“Distant
Suns”.
The free codes “Your
Sky”
by
John Walker or “Sky
and Telescope”
magazine's,
“Interactive
Sky Chart”
are
just about as useful for the needs of this course.
January
15, 2008: I
hope that everyone who wanted to join the course found a place.
As it turns out, there remained 2 free places in Section 01 at
the end of the Add/Drop period. Now that we have a class, we can
begin to push through the course. My intention is to reach about
page 70 by February 19... in order to explain lunar eclipses
before that of February
20
occurs.
Given a cloudless night, this should be quite an spectacular
lunar eclipse and we would be able to see all of it before a
late bedtime.
As
I continue to scare you with threatening objects falling from
the sky, on January 29, a small asteroid is predicted to pass by
Earth at about 1.4x the distance between Earth and the Moon:
2007
TU24 .
This object might make the news that day... If you have a
telescope with a motor drive, you may be able to get an image of
the asteroid against the background starfield: click
here for
coordinates and UT times.
January
14, 2008: The
Mercury
Messenger
probe
makes its first close pass of Mercury today after 13h00. See the
NASA press release here
and
if you have the time to follow it, you might connect to the real
time visualizer here.
Messenger's orbital insertion about Mercury is still 3 years in
the future. It is 33 years since a spacecraft last visited this
planet.
January
12, 2008: UBC
Astronomers map regions of "dark matter"... link
here!
For the significance of "dark matter", you might look
ahead to the video "Most of the Universe is Missing"
as listed on the "Course overview" page.
Today's
science news program on CBC "Quirks
and Quarks"
presented an item on the possibility of asteroid 2007
WD5
hitting
Mars as well as another on the mapping of dark matter. Click
here for
a link to today's program with downloadable audio files.
As
the orbit of 2007 WD5 has been updated through new observations
and new calculations, it looks like it will miss Mars by about
20000km. Click
here for
a diagram of the periodic updating of the encounter since early
December.
The
NEOP has discovered yet another threat: 2008
AF4...
but only a 1 in 70000 chance of impact and that in 2089. No
worries for most of us! What might worry us is that this
relatively large object (~0.5km diameter) was only discovered on
January 10 and after it had passed very close (~8 million km
closest distance on January 5) to Earth, arriving from the
daylight side of the sky without warning.
January
10, 2008:
Earlier
today, another significant earthquake occurred along another
transform fault associated with the Juan de Fuca ridge off the
coast of Oregon... link
here!
In
reference to past final exams... It is a policy that I
strictly adhere to not to give direct answers to any question
that has been asked on a past examinations. I am more than open
to discussing the material of questions, even at length, after
the subject has been covered in lectures. The reason for the
policy is a very simple one: people who choose to deal with a
course as nothing more than an exercise in memorizing would be
preferentially selected over those who actually understand and
know the course material if questions+answers were given. Not
providing direct answers brings the memorizers, at least, to
find the answers to the questions that they might choose to
commit to memory by themselves.
The
posted final exam below (January 9 item) is not one that you
should expect to be able to deal with until the completion of
the course. The large “bubble chart” question is
meant to – and it seems to achieve this very well --
measure your overall understanding of the course materials. All
the questions that are asked in that chart might not be
explicitly covered in notes or class or even following the
suggested approach to dealing with this question at minimal
level. At the bottom of the “Notes
and materials”
webpage,
I suggest how you might minimally prepare for that question. You
shouldn't worry this, though, until the last two weeks of
lectures.
January
9, 2008: Past
exams should be available in the Redpath Library and online via
eExams.
Now
having checked the Library's eExam holdings, I find that the
April 2007 exam is not yet listed as available online. I post a
copy in *.pdf format of that exam (minus most of the
multiple-choice questions as such questions are not normally
made available via eExams) here.
I
also post a copy of a midterm exam from the 2006 Winter term
here.
While there will be no midterm this year, I shall go over this
midterm during the class of March 13. You should try to answer
the questions as we proceed through the course materials.
January
5, 2008:
Later
in the course we shall be discussing earthquakes, moonquakes and
marsquakes. This morning a pair of large earthquakes (1
2
both
Mw ~ 6.5) struck at the junction between the Queen Charlotte
transform fault and the Cascadia Subduction fault north of
Vancouver Island. This earthquake might have been felt on the
south coast of BC in Vancouver and Victoria, for example. Here
is today's
record of seismic activity
(24
hours previous to this moment) as recorded by instruments in
Parkfield, California. If you miss this record, here
is a link
to
the record of January 5, 2008.
You
can also watch current seismic ground motions in real time as
recorded by the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sydney, BC here!
January
4, 2008: Blake Marple has just sent me the links to the
course audio/video captures of the lectures. The video files are
quite large (~200MB). You will appreciate a high-speed internet
link for downloading the video lectures. You might also concern
yourself with the high download costs for new VideoTron and
Sympatico services and wait to download missed lecture files
when next on campus. It is becoming clear that Canadian ISPs and
mobile phone services are the most expensive in the western
world... For the Americans among us who wonder why we appear to
be so technologically primitive, the extreme cost of bandwidth
in Canada is largely the reason we do not have iPhone service.
Here
are the links to the audio and video recordings of the lectures:
Leacock:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2008-WINTER&Course=EPSC-200-001
Otto
Maass:
http://lrs.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?Semester=2008-WINTER&Course=EPSC-200-002
January
3, 2008:
Answers
to the question posed in today's class: Find an explanation the
orbit of the Earth and our closest proximity to the Sun
here.
Find an animated explanation of seasons here.
January
1, 2008: The first lectures are held January 3 in
Leacock 132 (13h05) and Otto Maass 112 (16h05).
A
first news item:
As
they are continually monitoring its orbit, NASA's Near
Earth Object Program
have
determined the risk that an asteroid discovered in 1994, 1994
WR12 ,
has less than 1 chance in 10 000 of hitting the Earth in the
next century. Currently, this is that object being tracked that
shows the highest cumulative probability of impact with Earth.
For an animated diagram of its orbit, click
here!
During
the last couple of days, another object has been discovered that
may pose an even higher impact risk. 2007
VK184 has
only been tracked since November 18 and so its orbit is not yet
well defined. Current orbital parameters suggest about 3 chances
in 10000 of an impact with Earth on June 3, 2048.
A
second news item:
If
you login to this news site today, you can still see Mercury
passing behind the Sun (toward the left) in the SOHO images: [
56.6k
or
broadband
]
and Jupiter passing behind the Sun toward the right. You might
try to think about why they move across the image in opposite
directions... If you watch carefully in the lower right corner
of the image you see a whitish cloud. This is a stellar-dense
patch of our Milky Way Galaxy. Note that our perspective to the
background stars changes during our orbit of the Sun. In six
months, the image will show the star field that is now behind
our back when we look towards the Sun. The Solar and
Heliospheric Observatory site: click
here!
Archive
of news stories from previous years' courses....
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