Solar coronal mass ejection. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare.
In my PHYS204 – Planetary Astronomy lab today, the students gave final presentations on their semester projects.
This semester is the first time we in the Physics Dept have offered the Planetary Astronomy class, and as an experiment, I asked the students to break into several groups and gave each group a research project. These projects are legitimate research projects, not simplified exercises, so they were quite challenging for the students, who have little to no research experience.
But the students did an excellent job, overcoming a variety of hurdles, from taming stellar evolution models to wrapping hundreds of feet of wire to build a radio antenna to detect solar flares.
I asked the students to keep a wiki, describing their projects and progress. Their presentations are also available.
Many of them will continue on into the PHYS205 – Stellar Astronomy class and keep pushing their projects forward.
