Thesis Topic Astrophysics

[Sidthestloth]

Hello all,

I'm trying to decide on a thesis topic in the feild of theoretical astrophysics. My courses are mostly online and all my texts and lectures say to "bounce around ideas" with your fellow students and the scientific community, so lacking in that area i was hoping to get a bit of brainstorming here.

My main areas of research are dark matter/energy and solar-terrestrial interactions.

feel free to ask me any questions you want to, i'm not looking for somone to hand me an answer. i'd rather discuss it back and forth.

Thanks in advance,

Sid

[Serena2003]

Hello all,

I'm trying to decide on a thesis topic in the feild of theoretical astrophysics. My courses are mostly online and all my texts and lectures say to "bounce around ideas" with your fellow students and the scientific community, so lacking in that area i was hoping to get a bit of brainstorming here.

My main areas of research are dark matter/energy and solar-terrestrial interactions.

feel free to ask me any questions you want to, i'm not looking for somone to hand me an answer. i'd rather discuss it back and forth.

Thanks in advance,

Sid

 

Perhaps something along the lines of how dark matter may affect solar terrestrial interactions?

[ajb]

Perhaps something along the lines of how dark matter may affect solar terrestrial interactions?

 

 

This is very interesting and I believe very topical.

 

The Sun is by far the biggest source of gravity in the Solar System. Presumably, if dark matter are WIMPS many of them will be attracted towards the Sun and fall into it. Here they could gain energy from collisions with protons and fly out again removing energy from the Sun. The radial distribution of temperature across the Sun would be different if dark matter is present or not. This was first suggested (I believe) by Prof. Silk at Oxford [1].

 

The proposed method of looking at the temperature distribution is to examine the solar neutrinos.

 

My thoughts (not very well educated in this area) is that one would need to understand solar models very well and have very reliable "neutrino telescopes". Anyone care to comment on this?

 

Have a look at the IOP news article here.

 

 

References

[1] Light WIMPs in the Sun: Constraints from Helioseismology, Daniel T. Cumberbatch, Joyce. A. Guzik, Joseph Silk, L. Scott Watson, Stephen M. West, arXiv:1005.5102 [astro-ph.SR]

[Sidthestloth]

The radial distribution of temperature across the Sun would be different if dark matter is present or not.

 

I really like the feel of that. That's somthing I can picture myself researching over the next year or so. The only glitch is my lack of ready access to a nuetrino detector. However it does fit directly into my research intrests and is certainly worth my time to contact some people to see about arranging time with a neutrino detector. What I do have at my disposal at any moment is a halfway decent radio telescope.

Anyone care to comment on this?

I am interested in other's veiwpoints on the topic as well. I've downloaded the reffrences at the bottom of your post and am going over them now.

Any other thought seeds? [related to this topic or not]

Thanks so far! you've helped me get out of a serious rut and I at least feel like my toughts are headed in the right direction now.