During the spring 2008 semester, we will meet on six Mondays (February 4, 18; March 3, 24; April 7, 21) from 7:00 to 8:30 pm in room 163 of Research I Building on the Fairfax Campus. Visitor parking is available in the Sandy Creek and Mason Pond Parking Decks. Click here or here for a campus map.
GMU Astronomy Observing Sessions are also held on Mondays, following the club meetings; click here for details and schedule.
The Large Hadron Collider is the next great particle accelerator. We'll discuss this article from Scientific American. If time permits, we'll also discuss how rainbows come to be.
2. If you turn on the heater in your room and after, say, one hour you turn it off, will the total energy of the air in the room be raised by the heating?
Sky & Telescope's news site has several brief articles on exciting new research. I found these particularly interesting:
Light Echos Give Accurate Cepheid Distance (You may also want to check out the Wikipedia article on Cepheid variable stars)
A Superfast Star from Far, Far Away
And, here are a couple problems.
We'll discuss this review article on gravitational lensing. Don't bother with section 3, which is too technical. Section 4 has several subsections, each on a different observational manifestation of lensing. Perhaps we could each read one or two of these, and share what we've learned with the group.
Here are a couple related problems.
Expanding on some of the topics from last meeting, we'll discuss this article from Scientific American.
Here are some problems.
We'll discuss this article on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Let me know if you are unable to access the link.
Here are some problems.
We'll discuss this article from Scientific American.
Here are some problems.