Term Project

Write a short research paper on a topic of contemporary astrophysical interest, of about 5 pages/2000 words.
This paper is worth 15% of your term mark, and is due Wed. April 2.

Sample topics might be (but, so long as they are astrophysical in nature, not restricted to):

  • Eta Carinae or other supermassive stars
  • Wolf-Rayet stars
  • White dwarfs (e.g, discovery and nature of Sirius-B, varieties, use in cosmology, etc)
  • Discovery of extrasolar planetary systems
  • Neutron stars, pulsars (history, nature, etc)
  • Hot subdwarf stars
  • Dark matter
  • Red and brown dwarfs
  • Blackholes (ubiquity, supermassive, etc)
  • Starburst galaxies
  • "hypernovae"
  • A particular famous supernova (historical; Crab, SN1987A, etc)
  • Solar cycles (e.g., nature, possible links to terrestrial climate, etc)

    And so on. Topics need not be of material covered in the course, but should be relevant to it (e.g., a paper on The Moon may be interesting, but might also be considered "extended geology" and not get full "content" marks). If you have questions about the suitability of a topic, please ask me.

    In this day of Internet-accessibility to information it should be stated that "Wikipedia" should only be a possible starting point. Other sources can be texts (your own included, but other different books are encouraged), other websites (of reliable content), magazines and periodicals (Astronomy, Sky&Telescope, SkyNews, etc), journals (e.g., Astronomical Journal (AJ), Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (JRASC)), etc

    Pleigerism, of course, is not tolerated.

    A breakdown for marks is as follows:

    75% - content
    15% - variety of sources (references clearly indicated)
    10% - neatness, spelling, presentation