My days as an Astronomer

When I attended college, I majored in Astronomy which is not a common major indeed. In fact there were about 45 students in the department, under and upper grad level, which was actually great because of the close working and teaching relationships with the staff. The university operated an observatory in Southern California and with so few students; anyone could work and use the facilities. Most students were research assistances to a professor and worked on several project of their own.

I was no different; I worked as an assistant and did a number of projects myself. All of the projects were on Eclipsing Binary star which were in a mass transfer phase. One project I worked on was the star V356 in Sagittarius. The period of orbit was about 14 days, so every 7 days or so there was an eclipse, one star passing in front of the other. The stars are given designations A and B, so A eclipse B then 7 days later B eclipses A.

During the eclipse we can study each star separately and we can see what is happening in general in the system. In this case, one star is shedding gas and the other is collecting it. In some cases, one star may pull gas off the other. But the effect is that the gas forms a cloud around one star and may obscure it from view or the gas may heat up and emit light from nuclear reactions taking place. What is seen is a changing amount of light based on the orientation of the stars and the cloud and the amounts of energy emitted.

This diagram shows many days of observation on one plot, the deep trough is from one eclipse and the shallow dip is the second. The gas cloud blocks the light of the second and that is why one eclipse is so great.