Astronomy Papers
The following are a collection of selected essays and papers written for
astronomy courses and other publications.
(Only the reasonably good ones — things that were rejected
or received poor marks have mysteriously disappeared.)
All these papers are © Copyright Richard McDonald, 2005-2006.
Plagiarism warning: If you’re writing papers on these topics,
feel free to read these. I particularly recommend
reading the References sections of these and other persons’ works.
But don’t copy the work. (1) you will be found
out — plagiarism is easy to detect; and (2) you don’t know that what
I’ve written here is correct.
(Nothing provides
better evidence of plagiarism than copying someone else’s mistakes.)
- The Shapley-Curtis Debate
- Describes a debate raging in the early 20th century over the true
nature of the “spiral nebulae” and the related question of the
size of the Universe.
Written for an introductory stellar
and galactic astronomy course.
- Planetary Magnetic Fields
- An introduction to the cause and effects of planetary magnetic fields,
and a survey of their attributes on a number of planets and
other objects in the solar system.
Written for a Solar System and Planetary Astronomy course.
- Supermassive Black Holes in Active Galactic Nuclei
- A history of the development of the theory of the nature of
Active Galaxies and a unified model based on accretion
into a central supermassive black hole that explains the
observed behaviour of the many kinds of AGNs.
Written for a mid-level galactic astronomy course.
- Are Spiral Galaxies Round?
- An exploration of the use of statistical techniques to test
the hypothesis that all spiral galaxies are perfectly round,
and the ellipses we observe are only projection effects from viewing angle.
(Spoiler: I had neither the data nor the statistical expertise
to reach a good conclusion.)
Written for a mid-level galactic astronomy course.
Old Hyvor comments