Space Rumors

IRAS 05437+2502, A Faint Nebula

2010-08-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

Scientists are not able to find the reason for the lighting of IRAS 05437+2502, a small and faded Nebula, which spins only 1/18th of a full moon near the constellation of the Taurus. The upper edge of this floating mountain of interstellar dust is particularly defined by the bright upside down V.

Mostly filled up with star dust, this ghost like Nebula is involved in the star forming region and the images were taken by the IRAS satellite in infrared light in 1983. This image recently taken from the Hubble space telescope, gives many details. But in this image, experts were unable to find out the cause for this sharp curve arc.

Huge ball of Fire

2010-08-07T00:24:00.001-07:00

The entire earth-facing side of the sun exploded in a tumult of activity on August 1st, 2010. This image was taken from the solar dynamics observatory and this made the news on august 1st, which shows a solar tsunami (wave-like structure, upper right), c-3 class solar flare (white area on upper left), large scale shaking of the solar corona, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, a coronal mass ejection and more, radio bursts and more.

This snap-shot from the solar dynamics observatory having multi wavelength extreme ultraviolet shows the northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different gases at different temperatures can be seen in this image. The magnetic field of the earth is still reverberating due to the solar flare on august 3rd, 2010, which sparked lowa in the united states and aurorae as far south as Wisconsin. Experts believe that there will be a second flare following the first flare and can re-energize the vanishing geomagnetic storm and spark a new round of Northern lights.

Pizza Moon

2010-08-06T21:05:00.001-07:00

This is lo moon on the Jupiter, made by the Galileo space craft. Called as volcanically dynamic object in the solar system, the lo moon has three dozen active volcanoes. Some are even taller than the Mt. Everest, the highest point on the earth. Experts said that there are no impact craters and the surface must be constantly recycled by the volcanism and is almost not less than a million years old.

Solar Tsunami

2010-08-05T05:45:00.000-07:00

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured high definition views of the SUN at a variety of wavelengths and snapped an X-ray photo of the Sun, on Sunday, august 1st 2010.

A dark arc was recorded by the satellites and identified as a large filament of cool gas extending towards the SUN’s northern hemisphere and exploded in the space.

This explosion is called as Coronal mass ejection and was aimed directly to the Earth, which immediately sent a “solar tsunami” racing at 93 million miles athwart space. This solar Tsunami reaches the Earth’s magnetosphere and may cause the geomagnetic storms.

Usually the SUN’s activity recedes on a fairly predictable cycle. Normally one cycle lasts for 11 years, roughly taking five and half years to move from a solar minimum, the period when we can find few sunspots, to peak at the solar maximum, when the activity of sunspot is amplified.

The final solar maximum occurred in 2001, which was weak but lasted long. The recent solar eruption is a sign that the sun is waking up and going towards another maximum. Experts said that when it touches the magnetic shield, it is likely to flash fabulous displays of the aurora or southern and northern lights.

Solar Tsunami that lasted for 35 minutes in the year 2007. The same thing happened again on 3rd August 2010.

Planet & the Radio dish

2010-08-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

Can you guess the name of this planet? Even though it seems something out of The Little Prince, this is our planet Earth. Don’t be shocked….it’s a small part of the earth integrated into a four image stereographic little planet projection. The fisheye image located at the central part points down; at the same time the neighboring wide angle images were taken at 30 degree tilts and digitally added later.

Some items like green grass, trees and dark shadows are surrounded at the image center near and far. At the top of the image, is a well lit Parkes Radio Telescope dish, in New South Wales, Australia. You can also see many jewels surrounding the sky at the night including the moon at 9pm, the small Magellanic cloud galaxy at 5pm and also the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy at 1:30 pm. You can see the complete picture HERE.

Black holes

2010-05-02T07:20:00.000-07:00

What happens when a star’s nucleus contains an enormous quantity of matter? The neutron star’s interior can not support its own weight, so it begins to compress into itself and collapses even further. But unlike the other processes in a star’s evolution, in this case a surprising thing happens. The star is condemned to totally collapse under its own weight. Its diameter begins to reduce at the same time that its density increases. There is nothing known in nature that is capable of opposing such an intense gravitational force.

How does this process end? Surprisingly, it can be said that it never ends. When the force of gravity is very intense, the effects predicted by the theory of relativity become important, particularly the shrinking time. We see that the process continuously becomes slower, in such a way that we can never see it end. There are other curious effects that have to do with this theory. At a certain point, gravity is so intense that even light can not escape from star in contraction. This is called a black hole.

Although black holes have never been observed, it is believed that they exist. If in the case of a binary star system, where two stars are close together, one of the objects is a black hole and the other is a giant, a part of the giant’s matter will be trapped by the black hole. The matter will begin falling toward the black hole and will heat up considerably and emit x-rays.

Pulsars, the Space Beacons

2010-05-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

When a supernova explodes, most of the star is destroyed. However, the stars nucleus can survive the explosion. What remains after the explosion is so compressed that it is like an enormous nucleus of an atom. It is called a neutron star, since it is primarily made up of neutrons. A teaspoon of this matter would weigh more than a million tons. A neutron star has about the same amount of matter as the sun, but its diameter measures only about 6miles (10kilometers).

Neutron star does not give off visible light, but they transmit radio waves (another form of electromagnetic radiation, on a wavelength much longer than light). These tars spin very fast on their own, emitting a beam of radiation that spins along with the star, exactly as a light house’s lamp does. Each time the beam points towards the earth, we receive a pulse of radiation. This is what is known as a pulsar.

Pulsars were first discovered by chance in 1967by two British radio astronomers. At that time the existence of neutron stars was only a theory. Today we know of hundreds of pulsars in our galaxy, and every year more are discovered. Astronomers hope one day to discover the pulsar that was probably formed after the 1987 supernova explosion in the great Magellanic Cloud. The pulsations from pulsars are normally repeated in periods of less than a second. As a pulsar ages, its speed of rotation slows and the pulsations become less frequent. The youngest known pulsar is the center of the Crab Nebula, which is all that remains of the star that exploded in 1054.The Crab’s pulsar, has a period of 0.033 second, which means that the neutron star rotates 30 times per second. Recently faster pulsars have been discovered, which reach speeds of 500 rotations per second.

Collapsed Star

2010-04-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

The stars in this image are a part of stellar cluster in which a supernova exploded, and the matter in it blows these stars at high velocities. This has been taken from NASA's x-ray observatory and spitzer space telescope shows the dusty remains of a collapsed star. Here x-ray data is shown in blue, data from spitzer in green (a shorter wavelength) and red yellow a longer one. The white color in the middle is a neutron star, or pulsar, all that remains of a core collapse supernova explosion.

Big Bang Research-Large Hadron Collider

2010-03-31T22:01:00.000-07:00

There were many Scientists, Students, common people who opposed for “The Large Hadron collider (LHC)”, near Geneva, the world’s largest and highest particle accelerator, which could reveal the secrets of our universe and gives amazing insights of the big bang theory and of course expose the baffling properties of the dark matter. Robert Cousins, a UCLA professor of Physics, who has served as a leader of the Compact Moun Solenoid (CMS) experiment at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), one of the LHC’s four main experiments said that “We're going to study the Big Bang as far back as we can take it,".

"The fundamental questions," raised by Cousins,” which were asked by the ancient Greeks: Where did we come from, what are we made of? How did the universe evolve and what are the forces of the universe?” "Nature likely contains extra forces that we have not found yet," Cousins said, "Any successful attempt to unify the known forces of nature will almost certainly unify some unknown forces of nature at the same time. The job of experimental physicists is to go find those forces. I am most excited about finding new forces that shed light on unification. If you're going to paint the complete picture, you need to know what the other forces are."

"In the last few decades, an enormous amount of progress has been made in cosmology, which addresses very large questions, such as how the universe evolved from the Big Bang," Cousins said. "If you run the equations of general relativity for cosmology back to the Big Bang, you also need to know what the smallest objects in nature are and what the forces are between them in order to get close to the Big Bang.

The LHC is one of the most complex scientific instruments ever built; it contains 9,300 magnets and has a circumference of 27km (17 miles). At full power, trillions of protons race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600m collisions every second. To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum – a cavity as empty as interplanetary space. Thousands of scientists around the world will collaborate on analyzing the data over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC).

Financial support came from many sources, including the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the NSF. Ten thousand people from 60 countries helped design and build the collider and its experiments, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, technicians and students from more than 90 U.S. universities and laboratories supported by the DOE's Office of Science and the NSF. Participating U.S. universities include strong research groups from UCLA and seven other UC campuses. The LHC took 5.6 billion dollars to build and was restarted in November following extensive repairs costing 9.9 million dollars after a chain of damage occurred in the massive superconducting magnets. Since then it has been operating well, until it took a winter break for a month aimed to ready it for the collisions at record energy levels.

CMS is designed to measure the momentum, direction and energy of the particles that remain when the new particles decay.

A second experiment at CERN called ATLAS will use different techniques to answer the same key questions. CMS weighs more than 13,000 tons and contains 75 million silicon sensors. It has a detector, "a fantastic device," Cousins says, that is like a digital camera with 65 million pixels and the ability to take 40 million photographs per second. "My thesis experiment 30 years ago had seven channels to detect photons and electrons," Cousins said. "The experiment I did after my thesis had a couple hundred. But now CMS has more than 75,000. The technology is mind-boggling.”

"We're going to find out what nature has in store for us," Cousins. "We'll see and measure the particles that come out of the region where the clouds of protons collide." “It could take several days to achieve collisions because of the complexity of the task. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself, it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way", said Steve Myers, the director for Accelerators and Technology. By March 19th, the collider fired beans of protons in both clock wise and anti clockwise direction with an energy of 3.5 trillion (tera) electron volts, which is 3 ½ times higher than previous record set last year in order to test the control systems last year. The LHC will soon collide these proton beams against each other and will continuously run for 18-24 months with a short technical pause at the end of 2010 according to CERN operators. Then the physicists will analyze the particles produced in the collisions & CERN eventually plans to collide proton beams with an intense of 7 Tera-electron-volts in both directions and the final objective was to reach 14TeV.

After several false starts early on Tuesday, scientists just before 1pm local time brought together the two proton beams that had been running in alternate directions in the collider’s 27km(tunnel below the Swiss-French border — the coldest place in the universe at slightly above absolute zero) loop in a vacuum at minus 271°C. The resulting heat was equivalent to 100,000 times that generated by the sun. The success triggered rounds of appreciation and ovation from the scientists and journalists gathered in the circular control room, while allaying concerns that the experiment would create a black hole and destroy the universe.

Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, said: “It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.” "This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 — what happened in the beginning," physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press. "This is the Jurassic Park for particle physicists," said Phil Schewe, a spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. He called the collider a time machine. "Some of the particles they are making now or are about to make haven't been around for 14 billion years."

Stars Death

2010-03-30T22:52:00.000-07:00

Many stars spend most of their old age as red giants. Their nuclei are made up of very hot and compressed helium. When the temperature in the center of these stars reaches 200 million degrees, the helium nuclei will begin to react. These new nuclear reactions bring about heavier elements of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. The energy produced by these reactions momentarily stops the contraction in the star. The wrapping of the star is so swollen that the star begins to loose its outer layers, releasing a hydrogen gas bubble. These bubbles are known as planetary nebulas, because when seen through a small telescope, they appear in the shape of a disc, some what similar to a planet.

One of the most spectacular examples of a planetary nebula is the Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra. The gas bubble appears as a ring because only its edges are visible. In the center of a planetary nebula there is always a blue-white star. This is the old nucleus of a very compressed and hot red giant which has become exposed after loosing its wrapping. Such stars are called white dwarfs. They are made up of ice, carbon, oxygen. They have approximately the same amount of matter as the sun, but are only as big as the Earth. They have a very high density, thousands of times that of water. The sun, and all other stars with similar masses, will end their lives as white dwarfs. They are inert stars that will not evolve further. They start to cool over a period of billions of years, until they become dark dwarfs.

Supernovas, The Great Fire Works

2010-03-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Not all stars end their lives as quietly as the white dwarfs. Massive stars, with much more matter than the sun, continue a more complex evolution and finish their existence in a far more spectacular way. The nucleus of these stars is so compressed and hot that more nuclear reactions can occur. When such a star has used up all of its hydrogen, the nucleus becomes compressed and heats up until the carbon react bringing about heavier elements. When the carbon has run out, a similar process begins. These different phases happen quickly, because the new nuclear reactions produce less energy each time. Toward the end, the star begins to acquire a structure of layers, with the nucleus being made up of iron. When it is no longer possible to obtain more energy from the iron, the stars center collapses in on itself and the whole star explodes in one great, unimaginable bang. This explosion can produce a glow of more than one hundred million suns. We call such an explosion a Supernova. Most of the stars matter disperses into space. The explosion produces a rapidly expanding nebula. The Crab nebula in the constellation Taurus is the remains of a supernova that Chinese astronomers saw in 1054.

Giant Stars

2010-03-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Stars finish their fully developed life when they have consumed all the hydrogen in their center. This happens when they have used up all their energy supply, which up to this point maintains the stars stability. The stars nucleus can no longer resist the rest of the stars weight, and begins to contract. Such compression makes the temperature of the nucleus rise and causes nuclear reactions in the layer surrounding the nucleus. The energy produced outside the center of the star makes the stars different layers dilate and cool. The star swells and then becomes reddish. This is what we call a red giant. A typical red giant is about one hundred times bigger than our sun.

When the sun becomes a red star, in about 5 billion years, it will expand out to a maximum radius of roughly 1 AU (150,000,000 km), 250 times its present size. As a giant, the Sun will lose roughly 30% of its current mass and it will grow so big that it will reach and burn up the nearest planets, mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. Many stars in the red giant stage undergo periodic changes in brightness. This is because they expand and shrink rhythmically. They are called Pulsating Variables. When the hydrogen is exhausted, the star stops being a fully developed star and becomes an old star. The core is compressed enough to start helium fusion, and the star now gradually shrinks in radius and increases its surface temperature. For larger stars, the core region transitions directly from fusing hydrogen to fusing helium.

After the star has consumed the helium at the core, fusion continues in a shell around a hot core of carbon and oxygen. The star then follows an evolutionary path that parallels the original red giant phase, but at a higher surface temperature. The life span of the stars depends on their mass, that is, on the amount of matter in the star. The greater the amount of matter from which the star formed, the more condensed and hot its nucleus is. The star is brighter and hotter; its surface is bluish. A blue star uses up its hydrogen in only some millions of years, a very short time compared to the sun. This is why we know that bright, blue stars like the Pleiades are young.

Fully Developed Stars

2010-03-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

A star once it forms and begins to shine is a stable body that remains practically unchanged for many years. In the nucleus of a star, near its center, hydrogen is being converted into helium. The energy produced makes the interior of the star extraordinarily hot. This energy escapes from the surface of the star in the form of light and heat. The gas formed by the star tends to expand, and is capable of supporting the weight of the star itself, stopping its contraction. This situation lasts as long as there is enough hydrogen in the center of the star. Stars spend about 90% of their lifetime fusing hydrogen to produce helium in high-temperature and high-pressure reactions near the core. Such stars are said to be on the main sequence and are called dwarf stars, the Sun, for example, is estimated to have increased in luminosity by about 40% since it reached the main sequence 4.6 billion years ago. Every star generates a stellar wind of particles that causes a continual outflow of gas into space. For most stars, the amount of mass lost is negligible.

The Sun loses 10−14 solar masses every year, or about 0.01% of its total mass over its entire lifespan. However very massive stars can lose 10−7 to 10−5 solar masses each year, significantly affecting their evolution. Stars that begin with more than 50 solar masses can lose over half their total mass while they remain on the main sequence. The time for the main sequence depends on the amount of the fuel its having to fuse and the rate at which it fuses the fuel i.e. its initial mass and its luminosity. Large stars consume their fuel very rapidly and were short lived, but the small stars (red dwarfs) consume their mass very slowly and live for billions of years and at the final stage they become dimmer and dimmer. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, no red dwarfs have reached to that position.

Life stages of stars

2010-03-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

The birth of the Stars:We know that stars must have been formed at some time in the past, but we don’t know with what exactly they were formed with. The only reasonable answer is from existing gas and dust among the stars in the galaxy. This is called interstellar matter. Under normal conditions, interstellar matter is not visible, but when illuminated by a hot, luminous star, it forms bright nebula's that have a rosy color. The force governing this whole process of formation and, in fact, the star’s subsequent life, is gravity. According to one theory, when a cloud of
A star forming cloud in Cepheus, NASA image
interstellar matter crosses a spiral arm of the galaxy, it begins to condense and the internal gravitational force increases. This makes the cloud contract more rapidly. As the matter condenses, it breaks into pieces and gets hotter. The center of any very large piece reaches temperatures over a million degrees, giving rise to a protostar. Because of this high temperature, a nuclear fusion reaction starts among the hydrogen nuclei.

The energy produced at the center of the protostar stops the contraction and a new star has been formed. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. The remnants of the initial cloud form a proto planetary disc that revolves around the star. This matter can end up condensing and forming the planets that accompany the newly formed star. The period of gravitational contraction lasts for about 10–15 million years. Early stars of less than 2 solar masses are called T Tauri stars, while those with greater mass are Herbig Ae/Be stars. These newly born stars emit jets of gas along their axis of rotation, producing small patches of nebulosity known as Herbig-Haro objects.

Mass of the stars

2010-03-12T23:04:00.000-08:00

Astronomers express the mass of a star in terms of the solar mass, the mass of the sun. For example, they give the mass of Alpha Centauri A as 1.08 solar masses; that of Rigel, as 3.50 solar masses. The mass of the sun is 2 Ž 1030 kilograms, which would be written out as 2 followed by 30 zeros. One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–150 times as much mass as the Sun; its lifespan is very short—only several million years at most. A recent study of the Arches cluster suggests that 150 solar masses is the upper limit for stars in the current era of the universe. The reason for this limit is not precisely known, but it is partially due to the Eddington luminosity which defines the maximum amount of luminosity that can pass through the atmosphere of a star without ejecting the gases into space.

Stars that have similar masses may not be similar in size -- that is, they may have different densities. Density is the amount of mass per unit of volume. For instance, the average density of the sun is 88 pounds per cubic foot (1,400 kilograms per cubic meter), about 140 percent that of water. Sirius B has almost exactly the same mass as the sun, but it is 90,000 times as dense. As a result, its radius is only about 1/50 of a solar radius. The Hertz sprung-Russell diagram displays the main characteristics of stars. The diagram is named for astronomers Ejnar Hertz sprung of Denmark and Henry Norris Russell of the United States. Working independently of each other, the two scientists developed the diagram around 1910.

IC1805 or Heart Nebula-Star Forming Nebula

2010-03-10T04:22:00.000-08:00

This is an image of the Wild Field Infrared Survey Explore (WISE), in the constellation of Cassiopeia contains a large star forming Nebula with in the Milky way Galaxy called IC 1805 or the Heart Nebula. IC 1805 is more than 6,000 light years from Earth. And we can also see 2 near by galaxies Maffei 1 & Maffei 2, which were slightly hidden by the dust of IC 1805 and were unknown until 1968 when Paolo Maffei found them using infrared observations. Both Galaxies contain billions of stars and are located some 10 million light years away. Maffei 1 is a lenticular galaxy, which has a disk like structure structure and a central bulge but no spiral structure or appreciable dust content. Maffei 2 is a spiral galaxy that also has a disk shape, but with a bar-like central bulge and two prominent dusty spiral arms.

Age of the Stars

2010-03-10T02:06:00.000-08:00

The average age of the Star is in between 1billion to 10 billion years old. Some stars are even 13.7 years old, equal to the age of universe. The age of the star is derived through the process of stellar evolution. The life of a star depends only on how much mass the star has. Stars that are 10 times the mass of the Sun will last about 100 million years. Stars with about the Sun's mass last about 13 billion years, and stars about one tenth the mass of our Sun last 100 billion years or longer.
The bigger the star, the shorter it's life span. The little low mass white dwarfs live for over 1trillion years and that of super giants stay for only 10million years.

Fortunately, astronomers describe the age of stars by using telescopes and observing their spectrum, luminosity and motion through space.They use this information to get stars profiles and they conclude the stars age according to its mass. These are rough estimates, but they can be made very precise by astronomers who study the physics of how stars evolve and change with time. As for what the average life time of a star is, it turns out that the average star in our Milky Way is a bit less massive that our Sun. If we look at all the stars near the Sun, we see that most of them are so dim that we would not be able to directly see them in the rest of the Milky Way. They are far more numerous than the dazzling, bright stars we see in the sky with our naked eyes. The average star has a mass of about half that of our Sun, so that means that the average star in our galaxy will live about 50 billion years or so.

Size of the Stars

2010-03-08T01:48:00.001-08:00

Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the human eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. Astronomers measure the size of stars by comparing with sun's radius. Alpha Centauri A, with a radius of 1.05 solar radii, is slightly bigger than sun. Rigel is much larger at 78 solar radii, and Antares has a huge size of 776 solar radii, and the super giants like Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation is nearly 1300 solar radii imagine it’s 1300 times bigger than the sun, however Betelgeuse has lesser density than sun.

Luminosity

2010-02-18T05:07:00.000-08:00

In astronomy, luminosity is the amount of light, and other forms of radiant energy, a star radiates per unit of time. The luminosity of a star is determined by the radius and the surface temperature. However, many stars do not radiate a uniform flux—the amount of energy radiated per unit area—across their entire surface. The rapidly rotating star Vega, for example, has a higher energy flux at its poles than along its equator.

Surface patches with a lower temperature and luminosity than average are known as star spots. Small, dwarf stars such as the Sun generally have essentially featureless disks with only small star spots. Larger, giant stars have much bigger, much more obvious star spots, and they also exhibit strong stellar limb darkening. That is, the brightness decreases towards the edge of the stellar disk. Red dwarf flare stars such as UV Ceti may also possess prominent star spot features.

Radiation

2010-02-16T05:03:00.000-08:00

The energy produced by stars, as a by-product of nuclear fusion, radiates into space as both electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation. The particle radiation emitted by a star is manifested as the stellar wind (which exists as a steady stream of electrically charged particles, such as free protons, alpha particles, and beta particles, emanating from the star’s outer layers) and as a steady stream of neutrinos emanating from the star’s core.

The color of a star, as determined by the peak frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star’s outer layers, including its photosphere.- Besides visible light, stars also emit forms of electromagnetic radiation that are invisible to the human eye. In fact, stellar electromagnetic radiation spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wavelengths of radio waves and infrared to the shortest wavelengths of ultraviolet, X-rays,
and gamma rays. All components of stellar electromagnetic radiation, both visible and invisible, are typically significant.

Using the stellar spectrum, astronomers can also determine the surface temperature, surface gravity, metallicity and rotational velocity of a star. If the distance of the star is known, such as by measuring the parallax, then the luminosity of the star can be derived. The mass, radius, surface gravity, and rotation period can then be estimated based on stellar models. (Mass can be measured directly for stars in binary systems. The technique of gravitational micro lensing will also yield the mass of a star). With these parameters, astronomers can also estimate the age of the star.

Characteristics of stars

2010-02-16T04:58:00.000-08:00

A star has five main characteristics: (1) brightness, which astronomers describe in terms of magnitude or luminosity; (2) color; (3) surface temperature; (4) size; and (5) mass (amount of matter). These characteristics are related to one another in a complex way. Color depends on surface temperature, and brightness depends on surface temperature and size. Mass affects the rate at which a star of a given size produces energy and so affects surface temperature. To make these relationships easier to understand, astronomers developed a graph called the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. This graph, a version of which appears in this article, also helps astronomers understand and describe the life cycles of stars.

Why do stars shine?
The stars shine because they are hot. But where does a star get its energy to be hot? Until fairly recently, the answer to this question was unknown. It was Albert Einstein, developer of the theory of relativity at the beginning of this century who answered this question: a small quantity of matter can be transformed in to a large quantity of energy.

The stars are mostly made up of hydrogen. Hydrogen is the simplest natural element and the most common one in the universe. A hydrogen atom consists of a nucleus with a single proton and an electron. The matter in the center of the star is very compressed by the weight of the star itself. This causes the protons that form the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms to collide violently with each other. As a result of these collisions, four hydrogen nuclei can come together to form a Nucleus of helium. The helium nucleus is made up of two protons and two neutrons. During this process of fusion, two protons are transformed in to neutrons, emitting a positron (a light particle like an electron, but with a positive charge). The helium nucleus weights slightly less than the four hydrogen nuclei that formed it. This small quantity of matter that has disappeared releases a large quantity of energy.

The nucleus of most stars is a true nuclear reactor, where fusion reaction takes place. The hydrogen nuclei collide violently with each other. Four protons can merge and create a helium nucleus with two protons and two neutrons. Like a star a nuclear power station gets its energy from nuclear reactions. But instead of getting it from the fusion of light nuclei, the power station gets energy from fission-the splitting-of heavy nuclei.

The Color and Temperature of Stars

2010-02-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed the color of the stars?The light they put out varies some what in color from one star to another. In some cases you can see this difference easily. For example, in the constellation Orion, which is visible in the evening around December, the two brightest stars have distinct colors: Betelgeuse, in the north east corner, is red; while Rigel, in the south west corner, emits a blue-white light. The stars have a whole range of colors, from red to orange, yellow, white and finally blue-white.

These color differences tell us how hot the star is. Every warm body emits light and heat(these are two forms of electromagnetic radiation), whether it is a star or an incandescent light bulb. A light bulb filament, heated by electric current, emits radiation, a small part of which is visible light. If, for example, the temperature of the filament goes down, then the light it emits turns yellowish or even reddish. If, on the other hand, the temperature of the filament rises, the light is not only more intense but also whiter and more bluish. The color of the light emitted lets us know the temperature of the body that is emitting it.

In this way, we know that the material the stars are made of is so hot that it takes the form of a gas: stars are huge balls of gas, mostly of hydrogen. This gas is extremely hot, and because of its high temperature it emits light and heat. The color of the light tells us the temperature of the stars surface.

Astronomers measure star temperatures in a metric unit known as the kelvin. One kelvin equals exactly 1 Celsius degree (1.8 Fahrenheit degree), but the Kelvin and Celsius scales start at different points. The Kelvin scale starts at -273.15 degrees C. Therefore, a temperature of 0 K equals -273.15 degrees C, or -459.67 degrees F. A temperature of 0 degrees C (32 degrees F) equals 273.15 K.

Dark red stars have surface temperatures of about 2500 K. The surface temperature of a bright red star is approximately 3500 K; that of the sun and other yellow stars, roughly 5500 K. Blue stars range from about 10,000 to 50,000 K in surface temperature. Although a star appears to the unaided eye to have a single color, it actually emits a broad spectrum (band) of colors. You can see that starlight consists of many colors by using a prism to separate and spread the colors of the light of the sun, a yellow star. The visible spectrum includes all the colors of the rainbow. These colors range from red, produced by the photons (particles of light) with the least energy; to violet, produced by the most energetic photons.

Stars

2010-02-09T02:32:00.000-08:00

A star is a massive, luminous ball of plasma that produces a tremendous amount of light and other forms of energy which is held together by gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth. Other stars are visible in the night sky, when they are not outshone by the Sun. The sun looks like a ball because it is much closer to Earth than any other star.

The sun and most other stars are made of gas and a hot, gas like substance known as plasma. But some stars, called white dwarfs and neutron stars, consist of tightly packed atoms or subatomic particles. These stars are therefore much denser than anything on Earth. For most of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion in its core releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created by fusion processes in stars.

Astronomers can determine the mass, age, chemical composition and many other properties of a star by observing its spectrum, luminosity and motion through space. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant in its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star are determined by its evolutionary history, including the diameter, rotation, movement and temperature. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertz sprung-Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.

About 75 percent of all stars are members of a binary system, a pair of closely spaced stars that orbit each other. The sun is not a member of a binary system. However, its nearest known stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is part of a multiple-star system that also includes Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. The distance from the sun to Proxima Centauri is more than 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers). This distance is so great that light takes 4.2 years to travel between the two stars. Scientists say that Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from the sun.

What is a light year? The distance that a ray of light travels in one year is known as a light year. Light is the fastest of all things known to man. A Danish astronomer, Olaus Roemer(1644-1710), first calculated the speed of light in 1676 as 1,86,000 miles(2,97,600kilo meters) per second. Later German born American physicist professor Albert Michelson (1852-1931) made a more accurate calculation of the speed of light as 1,86,284miles per second, for all practical purposes the speed of light is taken as 1,86,000miles per second. The distance covered by light at this speed in a year is about 6*10 ¹² miles or 9.6*10 ¹² (96,000,000,000,000) kilometers. This distance is one light year. The maximum width of our galaxy is 1,20,000 light years. Can you try to imagine such a huge formation?

Copernicus Nicholas(1473-1543)

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Birth&Family: Copernicus, Nicholas,(1473–1543), Polish astronomer, born on February 19 in Torun city of Poland in Europe. His fathers name was Copernide and his mothers name was Barbara. Nicholas was the youngest among 2sons and 2daughters. Torun was a big and prosperous trade center at the time of birth of this great scientist, astrologer, mathematician and Philosopher . His father was a scholarly magistrate of the city. Besides, he was a rich, cultured, distinguished social worker and a well wisher of society.

When Nicholas was 10years old, his father died. The children were then put under the care of their uncle Lucas. His uncle was a priest and educationist. He was a respected figure in society. It was but natural for the children to be brought in the culture and religious environment .Young Nicholas had made up mind to become a preacher and accordingly focused his energies in the direction.

Education:At the age of 18, Copernicus joined the Krakow university in the Poland’s capital Krakow . It was a well known institute at that time with some of the best teachers in the land .A highly reputed institute. It attracted intelligent students from as far as Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland who came here to study. Latin was prominent and important medium of instruction . He then started taking deep interest in astronomy, geometry(mathematics) and geography besides other important areas of study then.

It was a time when Columbus was successful in discovering the new continent of America. At that time, sea voyages were on the rise and with bigger ships and increasing sea travel, more emphasis was laid on astronomy. The need for accurate almanacs was felt, for festivals were celebrated according to the dictates of the church. Such was the state of society during that period.

Copernicus education took a different turn. In 1496, after leaving Krakow University, he joined Bologna school of law in Italy. From here he moved to the famous Padua University where he studied medicine during 1501-1505. There after, he took his doctor of Canon Law degree from Ferara University and he arrived and his uncles place in Poland. Discussions and deliberations with his uncle who was a priest led to the conclusion that his doctorate would be useful in taking up religious work. It was believed then that medicine and astrology were closely related. Once again Nicholas went to Padua University and joined the school of medicine.

Predecessors:The famous astronomer and mathematician scientist Ptolemy (90AD-168AD) was born in Alexandria, Egypt. In 150Ad, Ptolemy had made some important observations regarding the motion of celestial bodies. Though he did not entirely understand many peculiarities of these heavenly bodies, he believed in what he saw and accepted the prevailing belief that the earth is stationary and the entire universe revolves around it. Therefore, he believed in the seeming truth that Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

Four centuries after Ptolemy, had come to the conclusion that the Sun was the center of the universe, but puritans did not heed to his conclusions and he was criticized. Ptolemy was influenced by popular belief. Accepting the Geocentric theory of the universe, Ptolemy based his calculations on it in his volume “the Great Treatise of Astronomy”, better known as “Almegaste”. Hence certain flaws appear in his calculations.

In Greek, “Planet” means “something that wanders on its own”. It had become an acceptable fact with philosophers, religious, propagating the belief that the earth was stationary and the sun and other planets revolved around the earth. Ptolemy, tried to explain the planetary motions and their positions, of which only some were true. Regarding the wrong calculations he had made, he justified them by calling them wandering celestial bodies. Poland’s famous scientist Copernicus was able to understand the complex planetary motions of these celestial bodies, but for this he had assumed that the sun was at the center of the universe.

Major Works: During his learning years, Copernicus got a job as a junior priest in a church. Thus he received knowledge of science, religion and philosophy. Besides, he had studied law, which gave him a deep insight in to the laws governing the church. Add to this his knowledge of Greek and Latin, and he was a well versed scholar at the age of 33. He returned to Poland to serve his ailing uncle. Here his leisure hours were spent in independent study.

This gave him a new insight into the universe and a scientific approach also. Initially, he accepted the ancient Greek and Arab calculations as they were. He had no appropriate instruments, but his was a thinking mind that worked wonders. On the basis of mathematics and philosophy he visualized the universe as a divine arrangement and made some observations. But all these remained in his note books.

Successors: In 1539, a 25-year old German student named George Rheticus came to him and studied the notes and calculations of Copernicus for 2 years. He came to a conclusion that Copernicus observations were note worthy and needed to be published. Taking in to account of the motions of planets Copernicus classified them. He had clearly stated that the sun is at the center of the universe and all planets including the earth revolve around it. He had developed a theory based on it.

His Writings: Taking all his theories in to account along with his theories, he wrote a treatise. But fearing a religious backlash due to Ptolemy’s widespread influence at that time, he did not get it published. In 1543, with Copernicus falling ill, George Rheticus and his other friends took his permission to get his treatise printed and took it to Germany. The book was named as “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (The revolution of the heavenly spheres). The total credit goes to Rheticus.

Death: When the printed book reached Copernicus, he was on his death bed. He was in no condition to pass judgment or appreciate it. His heart has gone weak and his brain almost dead. He died soon after seeing the first print of the book in 1543.

Signature:

Albert Einstein(1879-1955)

2010-01-28T03:32:00.001-08:00

Birth& Family: The world Famous, greatest scientist of the 20th century and the pioneer of the theory of relativity, Albert Hermann Einstein was born on March 14, 1879at Ulm in southern part of Germany in a middle class Jewish family. With in a year of his birth the family migrated to Munich. His father set up an electro-chemical plant and engineering works here. It was then that uncle Jacob stimulated a fascination for mathematics and uncle Caesar Koch stimulated a consuming curiosity about science in Einstein.

Child Hood: Though he led an ordinary life, the child Albert in child hood, was unlike other children. He learnt to speak much later than the average period it takes for a normal child to speak. This worried his parent. He would rather lie down and day dream than play with other children of his age. He disliked physical strain. He even did not like playing any game. But due to his mothers interest in music, he had an ear for good music. He also learned to play violin at the age of 6, which remained through out his life.

Education: Albert’s parents were religious, not fanatics. They admitted him to a nearby catholic school. At 10, he went to secondary school known as Gymnasium where students were given pre-university training. They also taught some Jewish scripture. Thus he received knowledge of both Jewish and catholic faiths in his schools and knew the vices and virtues of both the faiths as well. However he did not like the education system and the compulsory physical training class.

When Albert was 15years old, his father faced financial problems and shifted their family to Milan, Italy. But Albert stayed back in Munich and continued his studies in Gymnasium and completed his diploma. After completion he shifted to Italy and joined in Mathematical physics in Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, Zürich, in Switzerland. Due to his passion in Mathematics he impressed his teachers & principal, & participated in different discussions. Einstein was a brilliant student. He carried the best of opinions and recommendations from his teachers and professors, but failed to get a teaching job. This was a big disappointment for him and joined in Swiss Patent Office at Bernie & in leisure time he continued his study of mathematical physics through self education & research.

His Achievements: During his tenure at the Berne patent office, he proposed the world famous “Theory of Relativity” in 1905. The theory later helped to build a nuclear bomb. At that time Newton & his laws of motions were very famous to the scientific world. These laws gave answers to many questions in Physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized physics, according to physics, it was an accepted fact that matter can neither be produced nor destroyed. Einstein discovered that matter can be converted in to energy and vice versa. His findings summed up in an equation E=mc2, where E=energy, m=mass of the matter and c= speed of the light where c= 3*10. (Power of 8) m/s. This is the most famous equation in physics. This equation made it clear that a little quantity of matter is capable of producing massive energy if it is processed in a particular way. Einstein used Planck’s quantum theory to explain the photo electric effect (proposed by Max Planck in 1900).

Along the quantum theory the scientists were attracted to the theory of relativity as well. The great Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose, who was one of the student of Sir Ashutosh Mukerjee, with Einstein’s permission translated the researched papers on the theory of relativity from German to English, and got them published from the university. In 1924 when Bose was visiting Europe for his further research, he personally met Einstein and thanked him for granting permission to translate his work. Einstein too expressed his pleasure for excellent translation by Bose. According to Theory of relativity, the rays of light should bend while passing near a massive star. This was verified by Eddingtonin 1919 during a total solar eclipse. He worked as an assistant professor in Zurich university and got approved by many scientists for his writings. He even got many invitations from many institutions from different countries.

In the fall of 1939, in a personal letter to the then American President Roosevelt, he wrote warning that soon German scientists would be able to turn Uranium in to a massive source if energy with a capacity to destroy the world. One such bomb would be enough to destroy a big city or port. He requested the president to sanction a project to counter the German bomb. As per his prediction, exactly 6 years later, on August 6th 1945, America dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. About 60,000 people died instantly, 100000 people were seriously injured & about 2, 00,000 people lost their homes. Another such bomb was dropped 3 days later in Nagasaki in Japan. Japan surrendered immediately and the World War 2 was ended.

Einstein was awarded the Nobel price for physics in 1921 for his research on photo electric effect. After putting forward his general theory of relativity & publishing papers in cosmology, he spent many years trying to develop a unified theory combining gravity and electromagnetism. He did not succeed and no one else has succeeded so far. Einstein was a fore most opponent of the deadly weapons of mass destruction like the atom bomb. He felt guilty, for his invention had caused large destruction in Japan. He even corresponded with Gandhiji, the apostle of non-violence, on this issue.

Death: This messenger of peace and a great scientist bade farewell to the world on April 18, 1955 at Princeton. He regretted and was pained by the misuse of atomic energy till his last breath.

Signature:

Newton Isaac

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Sir C.V Raman(1888-1970)

2010-01-28T03:28:00.001-08:00

Childhood: Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman, Indian scientist and the first winner of the Nobel Prize for science in Asia, was born on November 7th 1888, in Thruvanaikkaval village, Tiruchchirappalli district in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. His father is Chandra shekhara Iyer graduated with Physics and become lecturer. Since childhood he was slightly built but excelled in studies. From a young age he won many prizes and scholarships.

Education: At the age of 11, he passed matriculation examination with first rank; two years later he cleared the university inter examination with a first class, 1st paving the way for the scholarship. He completed his graduation from Presidency College at Chennai, with principal subjects as English & Physics. In 1904, Raman stood first in BA examination, in Presidency College.

After completing his BA he was to be sent to England for further studies, but due to his weak constitution, he cannot with stand the harsh climate of England, which was told by a civil surgeon in Chennai. Thus, he decided to study MA Physics from the same college. Due to the liberal professor in Physics, Raman has carried out many experiments with out any guidance. He carried out research in the diffraction of light. He gave his research papers to the Physics Professor, but due to the busy schedule, he was unable to reed it till 3months. So, Raman finally sent his research papers to London’s Philosophical Magazine, and was published in 1906. It was his unique achievement. In 1907, he bagged all medals and prizes, along with MA Physics.

Raman’s life: Since his ill health did not permit him to go to abroad, he decided to join the Government service. He appeared for the financial civil services examination and stood first. Raman was married to Loksundari. At that time Calcutta was the financial capital of India and Raman was appointed as the Deputy Accountant General there. One day while going to office, he came across a board bearing the name Indian association for cultivation of science. He visited the place and got all the information, came to know that late Dr Mahindra Lal Sircar has set up this organization to popularize Science among the masses.

Fortunately Raman got permission to carry out experiments. Before and after his working hours Raman use to stay there and continue his research. Thus his interest in research revived and begins to bloom thereafter. Here he had to do all the work for himself. Ashubabu the only servant of the organization would help him all the times. 3decades after the organization Raman’s 1st paper was published in ‘Proceedings of Royal Society’, London. Mean while on the basis of his research papers, he was awarded the Wood burn Research Medal. This was the 1st honor he received outside the country. This way the ‘Indian Association for Cultivation of Science’ too received recognition from abroad. The Chemistry and Biology departments also got activated. Raman also started the quarterly Magazine for the organization.

IN 1916, England’s Science Magazine ‘Nature’ praised this institute and Raman’s research work in a detailed article. Raman had totally dedicated himself to the Science and research work here. Mean while he was called to teach Physics in Kolkata University. He left his job of Rs.1,100 of Government and joined Rs 600 in the University. . In 1917, Raman resigned from finance department and joined as professor of Physics in Kolkata University. Now Raman’s timings changed from morning to evening at the association and at afternoon he worked for the improvement of Physics department and research at the University. In 1919, with the death of Amrut Lal Sircar, the honorary secretary of the association, Raman was elected as the new secretary. In 1921, Kolkata University honored him with an honorary doctorate and from then he was called as Dr.C.V.Raman.

Raman was selected to represent Kolkata University at the University congress held at Oxford in England. Here he got an opportunity to meet so many scientists like Sir Ernest Rutherford, Sir J J Thomson and exchange their ideas. Here he also got a facility to conduct some experiments. During the Mediterranean Sea voyage, the blue color baffled him and it led to the discovery known as “Raman effect”. Ramanathan is the first student to get a PhD degree under Raman, and is the person who witnessed a phenomenon called ‘Feeble Fluorescence’. In 1924, he was elected fellow of the Royal society of London, the same year he undertook the second foreign trip to Europe, America, and Canada. At the California Institute of Technology he lectured for 4 months as a guest faculty. There his work become more systematic and his approach to work had also improved. His research focused on the scattering of light, and also came to understand ‘feeble fluorescence’. In February 1928, he announced the discovery of the historic Raman Effect.

Raman Effect: When light falls on any object the incident light is partly absorbed, reflected or passed through the object. It also scatters light at times. Due to this new discovery, there was a surge of curiosity at the Indian association laboratory in Kolkata. Visitors from India and abroad came to congratulate Raman for his discovery, for which he was awarded the Noble prize for Physics in 1930. The British Government in the country honored him with the title “Sir”. It was the highest honors given to the scientist, not only in India but also in Asia. He now came to be known as Sir. C.V.Raman, and was at the peak of his career.

Achievements: In 1932 Raman left Kolkata and joined in Indian Institute of Science as director, Bangalore. In 1938, he resigned from this post and continued to work as Physics professor. Today IIs is one of the leading institutes for higher learning and research. During his life time, Raman conducted research on scattering of light , sound, color, the Physics of minerals, diamonds, crystal, besides research on color of flowers, vision etc. Of his 465 publications, three were published from Chennai, 177 from Kolkata, and the remaining from Bangalore. In 1988, the Indian Institute of Science brought out all the writings of Raman, subject wise in 6 volumes.

Demise: On November 21, 1970, he passed away at his dwelling at the Raman Research Institute, in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. The plants and trees that Raman himself had grown were now silent, probably in a state of shock. His last rites were performed there.

Notable awards:
Knight Bachelor (1929)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1930)
Bharat Ratna
Lenin Peace Prize

List of Scientists

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List of Scientists

The main objective of this post is to know each and every scientist, who worked on space.

1. C.V Raman
2. Newton Isaac
3. Albert Einstein
4. Copernicus Nicholas
5. Galileo
6. Hubble, Edwin Powell
7. Kepler Johannes
8. Ptolemy

Evolution Of Universe

2010-01-25T04:27:00.000-08:00

2.Steady state: Bondi, Gold and Fred Hoyle developed this theory. According to this theory, the number of galaxies in the observable universe is constant and new galaxies are continuously being created out of empty space, which fill up the gaps caused by those galaxies, which have crossed the boundary of the observable universe. As a result of it, the overall size of mass of the observable universe remains constant. Thus a steady state of the universe is not disturbed at all.

3. Pulsating Theory: According to this theory, the universe is supposed to be expanding and contracting alternately i.e. pulsating. At present, the universe is expanding. According to pulsating theory, it is possible that at a certain time, the expansion of the universe may be stopped by the gravitational pull and it may contract again. After it has been contracted to a certain size, explosion again occurs and the universe will start expanding. The alternate expansion and contraction of the universe give rise to pulsating universe.

A UNIVERSE OF EXPLOSIONS

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The initial "Bang" explosion is said to have produced only hydrogen and perhaps helium, but after the stars had pushed themselves together—they began exploding like strings of firecrackers. Then, reforming, large numbers exploded a second time. And presto! All 90 elements had been produced by the second wave of explosions! As the story goes, explosion after explosion took place as loose gas pressed itself into stars and then those stars exploded.

Hundreds of billions of stars were exploding all over the universe. This went on for long ages.

There was no reason why it started, and there was no way for it to stop. It was a self-initiating activity, destined to continue on forever. These regularly-occurring explosions should be occurring in our own time. When you go out tonight you ought to be able to see exploding stars in the sky. Each time these stars exploded outward, they gathered back together and exploded again. We are told that our own sun had its third explosion about 5 billion years ago. But, quite well aware that stars are not now regularly exploding in the sky, the

theorists came up with the idea that about a million years ago the explosions mysteriously stopped! Why did they set that terminal date at "a million years ago"? Because—at the time that the Big Bang theory was devised—the most distant stars were thought to be a million light years away, and since they are not now seen to be exploding—it was decided that they must have stopped exploding just before the time that their starlight was sent to us from that those farthest distances from Earth. It took a science fiction writer to bring all these new ideas to the attention of the scientists. Because it is a concept about how the entire universe began, the Big Bang Is called a "cosmology."

REARRANGING TIME—Half a century ago, it was theorized that the universe might be two billion years old. But in order to make room for this new "Big Bang" theory of the origin of matter, the age of the universe was pushed back to between 10 to 20 billion years old, with the Big Bang occurring most probably 15 billion years ago. This strange theory of fog coming out of nothing and then pressing itself into stars may sound like foolishness, but we are here discussing the only main theory of the origin of matter accepted by evolutionary scientists in this, the last half of our enlightened twentieth century. Since this is a major part of the overall evolutionary theory taught in colleges and universities all over the land, we do well to learn a few of the scientific reasons why it is totally impossible!

Bird Droppings on my Telescope

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Big Bang theory was totally rejected at first. But those who supported it had predicted that the ignition of the Big Bang would have left behind a sort of 'hot flash' of radiation. If a big black wood stove produces heat that you can feel, then in a similar manner, the Big Bang should produce its own kind of heat that would echo throughout the universe.
In 1965, without looking for it, two physicists at Bell Labs in New Jersey found it.At first, ArnoPenzias and Robert Wilson were bothered because, while trying to refine the world's most sensitive radio antenna, they couldn't eliminate a bothersome source of noise. They picked up this noise every where they pointed the antenna.
At first they thought it was bird droppings.The antenna was so sensitive it could pick up the heat of bird droppings (which certainly are warm when they're brand new) but even after cleaning it off, they still picked up this noise.
This noise had actually been predicted in detail by other astronomers, and after a year of checking and re-checking the data, they arrived at a conclusion:This crazy Big Bang theory really was correct.
Penzias and his partner, Robert Wilson, won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of this radiation.The Big Bang theory is now one of the most thoroughly validated theories in all of science.

OUR UNIVERSE

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Today i want to tell you about the expansion of universe. In your kitchen cabinet, you've probably got a spray bottle with an adjustable nozzle. If you twist the nozzle one way, it sprays a fine mist into the air. You twist
the nozzle the other way, it squirts a jet of water
in a straight line. You turn that nozzle to the exact
position you want so you can wash a mirror, clean up
a spill, or whatever.
If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like finemist from a water bottle - so fast that a gazillion
particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even

form a single star. If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came from by the force
of gravity. A little too fast, and you get a meaningless
spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole
universe collapses back into one big black hole.
The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference
is. To strike the perfect balance between too fast and
too slow, the force, something that physicists call
"the Dark Energy Term" had to be accurate to one part in
ten with 120 zeros.
If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would
look like this:
0.000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000001

General Relativity

2009-12-26T04:13:00.000-08:00

The first key idea dates to 1916 when Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity which he proposed as a new theory of gravity. His theory generalizes Isaac Newton's original theory of gravity, c. 1680, in that it is supposed to be valid for bodies in motion as well as bodies at rest. Newton's gravity is only valid for at rest or moving very compared to the speed of light.

The Cosmological Principle

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After the introduction of General Relativity a number of scientists, including Einstein, tried to apply the new gravitational dynamics to the universe as a whole. At the time this required an assumption about how the matter in the universe was distributed. The simplest assumption to make is that if you viewed the contents of the universe with sufficiently poor vision, it would appear roughly the same everywhere and in every direction. That is, the matter in the universe

is homogeneous and isotropic when averaged over very large scales. This is called the Cosmological Principle. This assumption is being tested continuously as we actually observe the distribution of galaxies on ever larger scales.

The accompanying picture shows how uniform the distribution of measured galaxies is over a 30° swath of the sky. In addition the cosmic background radiation, the remnant heat from the Big Bang, has a temperature which is highly uniform over the entire sky. This fact strongly supports the notion that the gas which emitted this radiation long ago was very uniformly distributed. The Big Bang model of cosmology rests on two key ideas that date back to the

early 20th century: General Relativity and the Cosmological Principle. By assuming that the matter in the universe is distributed uniformly on the largest scales, one can use General Relativity to compute the corresponding gravitational effects of that matter. Since gravity is a property of space-time in General Relativity, this is equivalent to computing the dynamics of space-time itself.

Before we discuss which of these three pictures describe our universe (if any) we must make a few disclaimers: Because the universe has a finite age (~13.7 billion years) we can only see a finite distance out into space: ~13.7 billion light years. This is our so-called horizon. The Big Bang Model does not attempt to describe that region of space significantly beyond our horizon - space-time could well be quite different out there.It is possible that the universe has a more complicated global topology than that which is portrayed here, while still having the same local curvature.

The Big Bang did not occur at a single point in space as an "explosion." It is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. That region of space that is within our present horizon was indeed no bigger than a point in the past. Nevertheless, if all of space both inside and outside our horizon is infinite now, it was born infinite. If it is closed and finite, then it was born with zero volume and grew from that. In neither case is there a "center of expansion" - a point from which the universe is expanding away from. In the ball analogy, the radius of the ball grows as the universe expands, but all points on the surface of the ball (the universe) recede from each other in an identical fashion. The interior of the ball should not be regarded as part of the universe in this analogy. By definition, the universe encompasses all of space and time as we know it, so it is beyond the realm of the Big Bang model to postulate what the universe is expanding into. In either the open or closed universe, the only "edge" to space-time occurs at the Big Bang (and perhaps its counterpart the Big Crunch), so it is not logically necessary (or sensible) to consider this question.It is beyond the realm of the Big Bang Model to say what gave rise to the Big Bang. There are a number of speculative theories about this topic, but none of them make realistically testable predictions as of yet.

Evolution of universe

2009-12-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

The three main theories put forward to explain the origin and evolution of the universe are:
1.The Big Bang Theory2.The Steady State Theory3.The Pulsating Theory 1.The Big Bang theory
The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe. It postulates that 12 to 14 billion years ago, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across. It has since expanded from this hot dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos we currently inhabit. We can see
remnants of this hot dense matter as the now very cold cosmic microwave background radiation which still pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors as a uniform glow across the entire sky.
Big bang theory was supported by 2 theories, General theory of relativity and The cosmological principle.

What is ASTRONOMY?

2009-12-10T04:02:00.000-08:00

A study of the celestial bodies and the universe is called "astronomy". One who is engaged in studying various aspects of the orbs like the sun, moon, stars, and universe and in unraveling the secrets hidden in space is an "astronomer".

Astronomy is a wonderful science. The Indian scientist, "C.V.RAMAN" (1888-1970), who won the noble price for Physics in 1930, said at a meeting of the Indian academy of sciences, "Let me say here and now, my belief is that there is no science as grand, so elevating, so intensely, interesting as astronomy... I think a man who does not look at the sky even through that modest equipment- a pair of binoculars- cannot be called an educated person because he has missed that most wonderful thing, and that is the universe in which he lives".

What is Space Rumors?

2009-12-09T21:11:00.000-08:00

Some times,certain things happen in life,like chasing beautiful flies,that take us far,far away and stir the flightly imagination.This blog also takes us on an amazing journey through space,find out about the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the origin of universe, and the Space Rumors that you heard or you want to know from this blog.

INTRODUCTION

TWINKLE TWINKLE
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!
How I Wonder What You Are
Up Above The World So High
Like A Diamond In The Sky!

A familiar nursery rhyme!Perhaps the first rhyme to be taught to every child, this small poem is a beautiful expression of the excitement of a little child who looks at the night sky
studded with numerous stars. This wonder seldom diminishes when the child grows up in to an adult. Instead he may well develop a strong desire to know what these stars are made of, how remote they are, who
placed them at such a distance and how they keep on shining for so long.

We live in an enormously large space- the UNIVERSE.
It is only natural that we would want to
understand this place, so scientists and engineers
have developed instruments and space crafts that
have told us far more about the universe than we could possibly imagine.

Apart from these,there are my raid other objects, invisible to the naked eye, whirling round in the vast, black emptiness which we call OUTER SPACE. This space and all the things in it make the magnificent universe. Another important point in SPACE RUMORS is tending to problems beyond every day and usual concerns. The pollution of the environment, destruction of forests, the extinction of various flora and fauna, the disappearance, of the ozone layer and similar cases have been mentioned as dangers which face the whole of the planet earth and its inhabitants.

Videos

2009-12-09T21:05:00.000-08:00

Chandrayaan : India's Moon Mission

The Elegant Universe - Einstein's Relativity

Black Holes: Creation & Consumption of Galaxies.