Lab no.

3: Colour-Magnitude Diagrams
Objective:
The Objective of this lab was to find the age of star clusters by seeing how
many stars are still in the main sequence.
Introduction:
Using CMDs (also known as Hertzprung-Russell Diagram) we can find the
luminosity and the temperature of the stars. In the H-R Diagram, the
temperature of the stars are ordered in OBAFGKM with O being the hottest
and M being the coolest. In luminosity for the CMDs, the brightest stars will
normally have a negative number (White Dwarfs, Blue Dwarfs, Red Giants
and up) and the dimmest stars go up to +15. The H-R diagram weirdly goes
in powers of 10 where the dimmest stars are normally up to 10-5 and the
brightest stars are 105.
In CMDs, there are 5 different structures that may appear. The 1st one
and will almost always appear is the Main Sequence. This is where most stars
lay for most of their lifetimes moving upwards on the diagram as it grows
hotter from Helium. The second one is the turn off. This is when most of the
Hydrogen in the core is burnt out but the stars dont have enough heat to
start burning Helium therefore get really big and become red giants or may
go into the Horizontal Branch. The Horizontal Branch is the part where red
giants could enter if it gains enough heat from burning and pressure from
gravity. This happens because the star stars burning Helium as its fuel and
gets exponentially hotter. Some of the stars that do have enough energy to
burn through Helium become Blue Stragglers who burn hotter on the
diagram and get larger as it ages.
There are three things that affect the what you see on the CMDs. They
are age, distance and dust reddening. The older the star cluster is, the
redder it will look. If it is younger, the stars will be bluer. In distance, the CMD
will appear dimmer than it should be if the cluster is farther and brighter the
closer it is to us. In dust reddening, the cluster itself may appear redder than
it should if there is a gigantic gas cloud between us and the star cluster. The
more dust, the redder it is.
Equipment:
Isochrone fitting software
Astronomy 102 Lab Manual

Procedure:
Part 1:
Using the isochrone program on the lab computers, observe all the clusters
and label which features each of them have.
Part 2:
On the isochrone program, put a ruler on 0.62 of the X-Axis (B-V). Find the
middle of the main sequence and put on table 1. You will also have to find
the uncertainty of the distance based on the width of the main sequence by
finding the m-M value of both top and bottom.
Part 3:
By looking at the CMDs, there are factors that affect the resulting picture.
Using the isochrone program, look at M15 and find the age, distance, and
dust reddening has taken place.
Questions:
Part 1:
Answers on table 1
Part 2:
Answers on table 1
Part 3:
1. The isochrone increases in brightness and also in temperature when
the age is changed. When the age is increased, the overall brightness
decreases and temperature decreases also. Both the brightness
temperature decreases the stars go back to burning hydrogen which is
a lot cooler than burning helium.
2. When the distance is increased, the stars move down because the
overall brightness is dimmed. It is different from the effects of aging
because aging effects both brightness and temperature.
3. When the dust reddening is increased, the star cluster moves to the
right because dust is a little red and a large cloud can make the overall
cluster redder.
Discussion:

In the results, I was surprised that most of the ages in the first table was
ZAMS because some of the clusters have all of the properties of stars (i.e.
Main Sequence, Turn-off, Red Giant, Blue Stragglers and Horizontal branch).
It may be that I did not fully understand what the program was doing. I am
guessing that the (m-M) and the E(B-V) actually refer to the red line and we
did not use the red line to plot the main sequence at first. This might mean
that we should be using data that came from table 2 but we were not
directed to use all the provided star clusters.
References:
Lab Manual (page 17-24)
Steve Mairs Sept 26 lecture (sept26_distmagcolour.pdf) accessed October
15th, 2016