Abstract
On a human scale, the stars are both ancient and modern. They are ancient in the sense that the value of the stars for gauging time and the seasons has been recognized since the earliest beginnings of human civilization. The constellations of the zodiac, which straddle the projection of the Earth’s orbit onto the celestial sphere (the ecliptic), were named over 3500 years ago by astronomer-priests in ancient Babylon. Yet despite the relentless weight of past history, the stars remain modern objects in the sense that they continue to challenge our intellect and because there are still many aspects of their structure and evolution that astronomers do not fully understand.
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Notes
- 1.
The term similar is used here since, as we shall see, the stars show a wide range in their associated masses, sizes, temperatures and luminosity.
- 2.
The word ‘virial’ is derived from the Latin word virias, meaning forces.
- 3.
It is interesting to note that Lane’s paper was published under the journal section heading of ‘Extraterrestrial Geology’; in 1870, there was no such topic as the physics of the stars.
- 4.
While called the solar constant, the energy flux actually varies according to the Earth’s distance from the Sun, being 1412 W/m2 in early January and 1321 W/m2 is early July.
- 5.
The SI units for the spectral radiance are watts per steradian per square meter per nanometer.
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Beech, M. (2019). Knowing the Stars. In: Introducing the Stars. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11704-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11704-7_1
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