Halmos Faculty’s Co-Authored Article Appears in Astrobites

Stefan Kautsch, Ph.D., associate professor and President’s Distinguished Professor in Community Engagement in the Department of Chemistry and Physics in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS), had a recent pedagogical research article picked up by the astrobites series. The article entitled,  “All in all, it’s just another brick in the mass function,” may be accessed at   https://astrobites.org/2022/08/26/all-in-all-its-just-another-brick-in-the-mass-function/.

Astrobites is a very popular reader’s digest for astronomy and astrophysics The article was co-authored with Kyle Hansotia, B.S., who recently graduated with a biology major from NSU. Hansotia was Kautsch’s research assistant. The other co-author was Dimitri Veras, Ph.D., an associate professor and Rutherford Fellow at Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability and Physics Department of University of Warwick (UK).

The article explains how almost all matter is distributed in the Cosmos and uses Lego bricks of a shark model to explain this concept. In general, massive objects are much less common than objects of low masses in the same object class, no matter if the objects are animals, plants, rocks, mountains, planetary bodies, stars, galaxies, etc. But the same law also connects all object classes with one another. The authors visualize the physics law behind this concept using Lego toy bricks and promote the teaching of this rarely known, but universal law. This article provides an experiential and active-learning approach to teaching complex concepts, while also discussing a potential explanation of the origin of the observations. The published version of the article appears in the European Journal of Physics, 42, 035605.

Posted 10/09/22