ASTR200 Winter Term 1 Assignment 1, 30 marks

Due 12:00 pm noon PDT on Sept. 17, 2021, in Gradescope.

Please indicate which page(s) correspond to which question(s).

Your answers must be clearly explained and neatly presented, or marks will be deducted.

1. Units and angles.

The planet Mercury has a fairly eccentric orbit. At perihelion, Mercury is 0.3075 au
from the Sun. At aphelion, it is 0.4667 au from the Sun.
(a) What are the perihelion and aphelion in m?
(b) The Sun’s radius is R = 6.96 × 108 m. What is the angular diameter of the Sun
in arcminutes, as seen from Mercury at perihelion and at aphelion?
(c) What solid angle, in square arcminutes, does the Sun subtend when Mercury is
at perihelion and at aphelion?
(d) What is the ratio of the solid angles subtended by the Sun at perihelion to aphe-
lion?
(e) Explain how you could get the answer to (d) using just the two distances.
2. Solar system orbit basics.
Let’s keep thinking about Mercury, using its perihelion distance of 0.3075 au from the
Sun and its aphelion distance of 0.4667 au.
(a) What is the semi-major axis of Mercury’s orbit?
(b) What is the eccentricity of Mercury’s orbit?
(c) What is the semi-minor axis of Mercury’s orbit?
(d) Use the Solar System version of Kepler’s Third law to compute the period of
Mercury’s orbit.
(e) What is the synodic period of Mercury in days?
3. Calculus refresher and approximations.
Consider a galaxy disk with a mass density ρ(r) that varies with the radius r. The
height of the galaxy disk is h. (Hint: think of the disk as a cylinder.)

(a) Write down a mathematical expression for the mass contained in a thin cylindrical
ring dm at radius r0 , with thickness dr0 , i.e., dm as a function of dr0 .
(b) Derive an integral expression for the mass of the entire disk with radius R.
(c) Consider the case that the density of the disk is ρ(r) = ρ0 e−r/Rs , where Rs is
the scale radius. What is the approximate value of ρ(r), when (i) R  Rs ; (ii)
R = Rs ; (iii) R  Rs ?
(d) Calculate the approximate mass of the disk, in the case when R  Rs , by per-
forming the integral.