We've never had to know formulas before so I'm trying not to worry about that too much. I worry that I don't have a handle on measuring mass, and that I can't even articulate sunspots. Let's try: A sunspot is when the Sun's magnetic field erupts below the surface... this is not right... anyway... and it causes the hot plasma-thingies to not be able to go into the area-thingie and it makes a cool spot thingie. Bah.
"A sunspot is created when loops in the Sun's magnetic field erupt below the surface and disrupt the flow of hot plasma, creating a cooler spot." That's better.
And mass measuring: determine the star's orbital period and semimajor axis then.... argh... Newton's version of Kepler's third law... something something... looking at spectral line shift means you can get the mass of the individual star... does this mean we can only measure the mass of binaries?
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