Sirius Matters

by Brosch, Noah

• ISBN13: 9781402083181
• ISBN10: 1402083181
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-04
• Publisher: Springer Nature

Summary

Since very early times Sirius was a point of attraction in the night sky. It served to synchronize calendars in antiquity and was the subject of many myths and legends, including some modern ones. It was perceived as a red star for more than 400 years, but such reports were relegated to the Mediterranean region. Astronomically, Sirius is a very bright star. This, and its present close distance to us, argues in favor of it being the target of detailed studies of stellar structure and evolution. Its binary nature, with a companion that is one of the more massive white dwarfs, is an additional reason for such studies. This book collects the published information on Sirius in an attempt to derive a coherent picture of how this system came to look as it does.

Author Biography

Noah Brosch completed his first and second degrees at Tel Aviv University in Israel and received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands for a study of isolated galaxies. Since 1983 he served in various functions at Tel Aviv University's Wise Observatory, presently as Director. Brosch is also the Principal Investigator of the TAUVEX Ultraviolet Space Telescope, the first space astronomy mission of Israel, scheduled for a 2008 launch. He is a past Chairman of the Israel Astronomical Association and is a well-known science educator, popular science writer and lecturer. The main scientific interest of Noah Brosch is evolutionary processes in galaxies with emphasis on the dwarf galaxies, but he publishes papers on a variety of topics from objects in our Solar System, through space astronomy, to extragalactic research.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. ix
List of tables	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
Historical perspective	p. 5
Introduction	p. 5
Egypt and the ancient Middle East	p. 9
Ancient Greece and Rome	p. 20
Africa and Arabia	p. 27
India, China, and the Far East	p. 29
North and South America	p. 29
Polynesia and Australia	p. 31
Jewish connections	p. 31
Conclusions	p. 32
Mysteries of the Sirius system	p. 35
The issue of historical redness	p. 35
Explanations for historical redness	p. 48
The binary nature of Sirius	p. 52
The Dogon tribe and modern Sirius mystery	p. 60
Conclusions	p. 68
Approaching modern times	p. 71
The discovery of Sirius B: a tale of gravity	p. 71
A third body in the Sirius system?	p. 79
Modern searches for third companion	p. 83
conclusions	p. 88
Modern optical measurements	p. 89
Astrometry	p. 91
The Hipparcos Satellite	p. 93
Photometry	p. 96
Spectroscopy	p. 99
Rotation	p. 107
Magnetic field	p. 110
Gravitational Redshift and Spectra of Sirius B	p. 112
Modern non-optical observations	p. 119
Infrared	p. 119
UV and EUV measurements	p. 121
High energy observations	p. 125
Basic stellar parameters	p. 127
Conclusions	p. 129
The neighborhood of Sirius	p. 131
Interstellar matter	p. 132
Very small LISM structures in the milky Way	p. 141
Stars in the neighborhood of Sirius	p. 145
Conclusions	p. 147
The perspective of stellar structure	p. 149
Upper main-sequence stars and Sirius A	p. 149
White dwarfs and Sirius B	p. 152
Conclusions	p. 163
The perspective of stellar evolution	p. 165
Evolution of a main-sequence A star: Sirius A	p. 167
Evolution of a white dwarf: Sirius B	p. 169
Binary star evolution: Sirius as population representative	p. 179
Conclusions	p. 183
Sirius revealed - a synthesis of the information	p. 185
Sirius analogs	p. 185
Sirius-basic data	p. 188
Synthesis of information	p. 190
Specific models for Sirius	p. 190
Red color in antiquity	p. 196
Conclusions	p. 199
Reference	p. 203
Index	p. 215
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