Never Asks a Star its Age @itelescopewebinars

Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Guest Speaker: Dr. Mark Popinchalk, American Museum of Natural History
Summary:
In this video, Mark explains how astronomers use the rotation of stars to determine their age. Dr. Popinchalk describes how the bigger a star is, the hotter it must burn in order to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium. This means that O-type stars might only live 4 million years compared to M-type stars that might live to 700 billion years. An interesting fact is that coronal mass ejections of stars tend to slow the rotation of the star due to the law of conservation of angular momentum. Astronomers use “starspots” to create the light curve of the star and thus determine its speed of rotation. It turns out that the slower the star rotates, the older it is.
This video will help you understand how astronomers use star rotation to determine their age. We hope you enjoy it!

iTelescope itelescope.net
American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/research/physical-sciences/astrophysics

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
3:49 My Path to my Ph.D.
6:20 Ph.D. work
9:33 Stars 101
17:44 How to guess a star’s age
28:22 Using space telescopes to measure a star’s age
37:55 Conclusions
38:23 Bonus Light Curves

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#astro
#astronomy
#cosmology

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$Almost touching stars - Astronomical Spectroscopy Guest Speaker: Tom Field, RSpec-Astro.com Summary: Learn how to do science with your own equipment. In this talk, Tom explains how to do spectroscopy with relatively simple star analyzers (diffraction grating) and what you can do with star spectra. As he describes in the video, hidden inside the rainbow of a star color is the biography of the life of that star, where the gaps inside the spectra are the star’s chemical fingerprints. Tom shows that to do science with star spectra, one has to create the light curve to capture the dips (absorption lines) in the light curve at different wavelengths, which, when mapped to the spectrum of different chemicals, the chemistry of the star can be analyzed. This is an exciting field to explore and to extend your astronomy interest. iTelescope https://www.itelescope.net RSpec Website https://www.rspec-astro.com RSpec Google user group https://groups.io/g/RSpec-Astronomy Chapters 0:00 Introduction 7:40 Example spectra 8:16 Star Analyzer and equipment needed 11:02 Chemical fingerprints 19:45 Overview of diffraction 20:16 Spectroscopic analysis 23:48 Great astronomers 25:53 What can you do with a Star Analyzer? 29:40 Emission and absorption Spectrum 30:49 From raw photons to qualitative data 33:05 RSpec software 38:16 Spectrum beyond stars 38:52 High-resolution Slit Devices 42:05 Planet Spectrum 44:01 Comet Spectrum 46:24 Flash Spectrum 46:52 Doppler shift and Spectrum 48:03 Type 1a supernova 52:41 Blackhole Spectrum 57:30 Stellar rotation 59:31 Detailed how to get started #iTelescope #astrophotography #deepsky #astro #astronomy #cosmology #spectroscopy$

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