r/AskAstrophysics

I've noticed that the moon, if you close your eyes after a long exposure, appears smaller than the light it gives off, when I repeat the the optical experiment inside the atmosphere with a spherical object, I see an imprint of the whole object.

Is this normal? Is this a lens effect due to our atmosphere in some way?

Hi, this is my first question here!

Recently I've been researching Titan, one of Saturn's very popular moons, with an atmosphere of 95% nitrogen, %5 methane, and trace amounts of other carbon-rich compounds. Supposedly, the sun's ultraviolet light breaks down nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, which recombine to form a variety of organic compounds. This sparked the question:

What gives an exoplanet its gaseous atmosphere? And why are those atmospheres most often some combination of methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide? Why aren't there any other oxygen-rich atmospheres out there, or chlorine, or neon? Maybe there are, and I just don't know about it!

Would love to know more about atmosphere types and what makes some more common than others.

Hello! Sorry to bother y'all, but I have a question. I was having a casual conversation with my friend during lunch about stars and energy, and I need help. We’re both fantasy writers, and creating magic systems and cross-referencing them with one another is how we pass the time.

Well, I’ve been dabbling with this idea of one of my characters taking all of the energy from the stars in the night sky, the Sun excluded, and redirecting it elsewhere. I have a VERY BASIC understanding of astrophysics, but I was worried that if a spell like that could redirect all that energy, it would pulverize a planet. I mean, it's SOLAR energy. My friend doesn't really care about the realism of magic; he just does whatever he wants with it to move the story forward. He says I'm overthinking things, but I don't think so. Magic, to me, should have some semblance of realism, and I want to get this right.

So, the big question: If you could collect all the energy from all the stars in the night sky, minus the Sun, how much energy would you have? Could you pulverize a planet or light a match?

Hey im a 13 year old and really want to get into astrophysics my IQ is 120 but my math skills are atrocious, can anyone help me out with either resources or tips? Im on a college reading level so book recommendations would help

hey all, i'm starting my master's this fall and am outlining my thesis to get a head start (yes, i spoke with my advisor about it). i did a senior/undergraduate thesis last spring and really struggled with efficiently reading and absorbing the content of all the papers that i ended up citing in my work. i feel that my current note-taking/source-tracking system doesn't really help me all that much, and for every hour i spend on research, i spend twice as much just trying to understand the papers and wrangle them.

my current system is to gather all of them in an ADS library sorted by topic/argument, read the abstracts, key figures + captions, and conclusions (and the other sections if necessary), and then leave a little note to myself in my bibtex file explaining the main takeaways. this was the method suggested to me by my mentors, but even that can take a long time because i find that i rarely need "just the gist" of a paper and my summary ends up being too vague. more often than not, i need to go back and find exact numbers to compare against my own result, and digging through the entire paper (sometimes only finding that the paper doesn't cite a number) takes forever.

my master's thesis will likely require even more reading and comparing, so i need to figure out how to make this process more efficient. do any of you have any strategies or tools for getting through lit review as efficiently as possible?