Mapping a Universe of Stars
Are all stars the same?
How can the colour of a star tell us about its history… and its future?
In this activity we will take a collection of stellar observations call the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars, taken by the Gaia space telescope in 2014. The catalogue includes the location of the stars, and the brightest wavelength of light being emitted by that star. Using this information we are going to create one of the most important plots in Astronomy – the Herzsprung-Russel Diagram (or HR Diagram for short).
Resources
The condensed catalogue can be downloaded as a CSV below.
Coding in R
We will be coding up our HR Diagram using the R langauge.
You can install R Studio and the R language (you will need both) on your own machine, or you can follow along using Google Colab.