Discussion on "Phoenix mission" and "Magnitude of binary system"

On Wednesday, 8th August we discussed about the recent launch of the mars mission “Phoenix”. Sukhada gave the statistics and the information about the mission. Nasa launched it on 4th August. Previous rovers Opportunity and Spirit were lost in the Martian storm. Due to this NASA named the mission as Phoenix. Phoenix will take 10 months to reach the planet. The lander will land on the polar region and will search the soil for water content, minerals and organic compounds which will unveil the history of the planet Mars. The lander has 8 special ovens which will heat the collected sample upto 1000 degree Celsius and will analyze it with the spectrometers. The discussion ended with one unanswered question; “What is the mode of Energy used to create such high temperatures in the Oven? Can the Solar panels be sufficient enough to generate the high temperature?”

Then Jayshree raised one question; “If we have a binary star system and we know the apparent magnitude of both the stars then how can we calculate the total magnitude of the system?” Sukhada said that the magnitude cannot be add up or the total magnitude cannot be the average of the two. Noone was having the idea or the formula to calculate the total magnitude of the system. Bhide kaka told that, “The magnitude will differ if the stars are revolving in such a way that one star comes in between us and the other star i.e. the pair is the eclipting binary system. Also the distance between the two stars will matter in the calculation.” He gave the example of galaxies. Though galaxies contain billions of stars we are seeing galaxies very faint as the individual stars brightness will not just add up to give the total brightness of the galaxy but their inter stellar distances will affect the summation of their brightness and what we see is the very faint galaxy than a bright patch.