To maximize what you can see in the night sky there are a few things you should do as preparation. Of course the first thing you need is a clear and cloudless night. And this includes the moon. You should try to do your observing on a night with no moon; or at the least the smallest sliver of moon possible. Its brightness will wash out many of the dimmest and most dramatic objects in the sky. Second you should consider your comfort. Make sure you dress appropriately for the weather and bring extra layers of clothing if you are observing during cold months.
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Most people know what a solar flare is, but few know about a very rare and yet very powerful type of solar flare - a "super solar flare." A super solar flare is about as powerful as the nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NEMP) that occurs when a nuclear device that is detonated. A super solar flare or an NEMP could seriously set the world back many, many years as far as technology is concerned. Our earth's atmosphere protects us and our equipment from regular solar flares, but can be easily penetrated by a super solar flare. Which could damage everything from our modern electronics to the power grid.
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Astronomers have found a planetary system similar to ours – a Jupiter-like world circling a Sun-like star in roughly the same orbit that Jupiter follows our Sun. Of the 100 or so other planetary systems known, this one more closely resembles our than any other. Reporting this, the BBC science editor Dr. David Whitehouse says that researchers speculate that this system may contain other worlds, such as smaller rocky planets like Earth, either in orbit around the star or around the Jupiter-like world itself. The planet’s parent star, called HD 70642, is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, but is easily visible in the southern sky using binoculars. At just 95 light-years away (a light year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers) the gas giant planet, bathed in the light of a yellow-dwarf star is on our galactic doorstep.
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The issue of lunar origin has been a subject of scientific speculations since the times of Galileo. The origin of the Moon is unknown, although there are a number of scientific hypothesis trying to describe where the Moon came from. The Moon is as old as the Earth - 4.6 billion years (this fact was stated by the scientists as they measured the age of lunar rocks).
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Moon, Earth’s only natural satellite, is a cold, rocky mass, about 3476 kilometers in diameter. It orbits the Earth every 29½ days, with its orbit tilted at 5 degrees from the plane of the Earth. During its revolution, it passes above or below the Earth’s shadow. But its only two times in one year that the Sun, Moon and the Earth stand lined up. Due to their relative positions, a part of the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon and a lunar eclipse is caused!
Moon, as we know, has no light of its own, and illuminates itself by stealing sunlight. The period of 29.5 days between two consecutive new Moons is known as lunation. On the night of a new Moon, the illuminated side of the Moon points away from the Earth and we see ‘no Moon’ in the sky! When the Moon is full, it is directly opposite to the Sun. The night of a lunar eclipse is a Full Moon night. Read More... View Comments (0)
Human kind has always looked to the heavens in awe and wonder, and sometimes in fear. Perhaps no other astronomical phenomenon except a total solar eclipse has historically evoked as much fear as comets. When the specter of fear is removed, however, they emerge as strikingly beautiful objects in the sky. It was once believed that if earth passed through a tail of a comet, its inhabitants would die; this theory has been discredited. Comets are messengers from a time long past. Most are chunks of dirty ice, locked away in the Oort cloud for billions of years.
Comets are familiar to nearly everyone as striking star like objects with long tails stretching across a wide band of the sky. The most famous comet, Halley’s comet makes its return to the skies every seventy-five years. The word "comet" is derived from a Greek word meaning "long haired" Comets were greatly feared before the twentieth century as bad omens. Since then, they have been identified and catalogued as objects that come from deep space. Most of them occupy orbits that carry them far outside the solar system. Many comets make only a single approach to the sun and never return again, while others exist in stable, but highly elliptical orbits that allow them to return after an extended period of time, such as the Halley’s comet. Read More... View Comments (0)
If you gaze at the sky at sunrise or sunset - very unlikely though with our hectic lifestyles - and see a sort of bright & fuzzy object, congratulations, you’ve probably sighted a comet . Now do a quick check with your local observatory to see if a comet was being expected, and if not, then congratulations once again, you just might be able to name it.
But it is not often that you can see comets with an unaided eye. The ones that can be seen with the naked eye are called, what else, but, naked-eye comets. A comet visible to the naked eye appears, on an average, about once in five years. But even then it is helpful to have a pair of binoculars or a telescope.
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Lior Burko of the University of Alabama wanted to know what happens when you silence the sound of a black hole. However, they could not afford supercomputer time to run the simulation. But Burko read on the internet that it was possible to wire up a group of PS3s so that they had the same number-crunching ability, and decided to give it a try.
The Alabama PS3 Gravity Grid was a network of 16 Playstation 3 consoles grouped together in a cluster capable of running simulations. It would have cost the scientists $5,000 each time they wanted to run a simulation on an ordinary supercomputer, but the PS3 grid cost them $6,000 and they could use it as often as they liked.
Burko's PS3 Gravity Grid resolved an ongoing dispute over the speed at which spinning black holes stop vibrating just after forming or being unbalanced by an outside object. There were two theories. The first is that black holes go silent at relatively fast speeds, while another said they went quiet at slower speeds. The simulations proved that the first theory was correct, depending on the mass of the black hole.
Burko explained it via an analogy with a bell, which rings, but eventually gets quiet. The energy that goes out with the sound waves is energy that the bell is losing. This is exactly what a black hole does, only with gravitational waves instead of sound waves.
Our Science Editor adds : Perhaps scientists in Alabama should concentrate more on science than marrying their cousins. If light cannot escape from a black hole at 186,000,000 miles per second, what chance does sound have at a pathetic 650 miles per hour? And they might also want to consider that sound cannot travel in a vacuum. Apart from that, good science all round. Idiots.
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Team leader Dr Klaas Wiersema of the University of Leicester will present the discovery on Wednesday 22nd April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire.
The RXTE satellite has been scanning the centre of our galaxy every few days for the last years, searching for variable X-ray sources. Through these scans it has found a multitude of varying X-ray sources, most of which are thought to be X-ray binaries. These systems consist of a compact star (a neutron star or black hole) that pulls material away from a "normal" companion star. This material forms hot disks, which emit X-rays. X-ray binaries are also known to spout jets of gas at velocities very close to the speed of light.
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