Related papers: A College-Level Inquiry-Based Laboratory Activity …
As part of a comprehensive effort to transform our undergraduate physics laboratories and evaluate the impacts of these efforts, we have developed the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS). The…
Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information towards understanding the structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the short-period or low-periastron distance regimes…
Here we describe a Jupyter notebook demonstrating methods for the reduction and analysis of exoplanet transit observations taken with the WFC3/UVIS G280 grism. Released on Space Telescope's hst_notebooks GitHub repository, this notebook…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
In the last years it is becoming more and more evident the importance in providing to the students, and people in general, a more realistic view on the scientific research world. In this framework many initiatives are beeing carried out to…
In this article we present and discuss a didactic activity that combines epistemic aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and a simple, relatively low-cost experiment on electromagnetic induction. The aim of the activity is for students to…
Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…
Eighty planetary systems of two or more planets are known to orbit stars other than the Sun. For most, the data can be sufficiently explained by non-interacting Keplerian orbits, so the dynamical interactions of these systems have not been…
Star clusters provide an excellent opportunity to study the role of environment on determining the frequencies of short period planets. They provide a large sample of stars which can be imaged simultaneously, with a common distance, age and…
Art and science are different ways of exploring the world, but together they have the potential to be thought-provoking, facilitate a science-society dialogue, raise public awareness of science, and develop an understanding of art. For…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
We introduce two simple online activities to explore the physics of neutron stars. These provide an introduction to the basic properties of compact objects, like their masses and radii, for secondary school students. The first activity…
Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…
Continuing work initiated in an earlier publication [Sato and Asada, PASJ, 61, L29 (2009)], we consider light curves influenced by the orbital inclination and eccentricity of a companion in orbit around a transiting extrasolar planet (in a…
Lightcurves have long been used to study stellar activity and have more recently become a major tool in the field of exoplanet research. We discuss the various ways in which stellar activity can influence transit lightcurves, and study the…
General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
I present an homogeneous determination of the physical properties of 14 transiting extrasolar planetary systems for which good data are available. The input quantities for each system are the results of the light curve analyses (Paper 1),…
We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument we designed…
Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students' experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices,…