Astrophysics

  Image taken from pixabay. I think we can agree that artificial intelligence is quite a fascinating thing. From the awkwardly walking robots of old Sci-fi movies to advanced A.I robots like Sophia we have come a long way. Yes, I know that it is a scary concept as well and there always appears to be a new Terminator movie to remind us about the threat that A.I poses to us. But atleast for now I think it can be and is quite a useful thing for us. Anyone who uses Siri or google assistant can understand what I'm talking about. Even though they are not very powerful they still gather data from our routine life and try to present the options that are more suitable for us. Making new discoveries.  Scientists from different countries are already, successfully, using A.I software to discover new galaxies, stars and even planets. For example researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) have made a new A.I called Morpheus which can classify galaxies and stars. It is b...

Black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 Credits: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al. If you do not find anything to be logical then it is your right to question it. But it seems really odd that in this day and age people still challenge scientific discoveries especially after seeing how far science has brought us in just a few centuries. It becomes even more confusing when the people who are challenging these discoveries provide no solid proof for their claims and outright deny any proof that scientists provide and label it as fake. Sometimes I don't even think that it's their fault because many such beliefs and rejections come from people in power. I don't want this discussion to become political but Global warming is one example of what I'm saying, it's effects are becoming clearer and clearer with time but the people who have the power to do something about it refuse to even believe it. Confusion about black holes and fake images. To be fair to bla...

  Source: ESO/K. Meech et al. Published: November 20, 2017 The above image might not look like much but in the center of this image, the tiny spec circled in blue between the trails of stars, is the first ever visitor from interstellar space discovered inside our solar system. It was discovered by using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii on 19 October 2017 by Robert Weryk. The name given to it is 1I/2017 U1, but it is most popularly known as Oumuamua which is Hawaiian for "the scout". By the time it was discovered it was already on it's way out of the solar system but still there are many things about it that make it interesting.  An artist's impression of Oumuamua Credit:   ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser Asteroid, comet or something else. At just a couple of hundred meters long it is not particularly large. At first it looks like a long and thin asteroid, because there is no tail like a comet. But its behavior is quite odd as it was not ...

  Image taken from pixabay. Firstly mass should not be confused with weight. We will get to mass a little later because it is complicated and my main reason for writing this is to simply mention the different things I found out and would welcome you to participate and share your information. Normally we take mass and weight as the same thing we even check our weight in Kilograms, which is incorrect because Kilogram is the unit of mass. Weight is defined in Newtons and is a force that is equal to the mass of an object times the acceleration due to gravity (W=mg). Due to this the weight of any object will change with gravity, that is the weight of an object will be higher on earth than on the moon as its gravity is weaker. Whereas mass of an object is always the same no matter where you take it. What is mass? When it comes to mass things become a bit more complicated. The simple answer is, an object has mass due to the matter it is made up of. But what about that matter, how does it ...

  Image taken from pixabay. We can feel the effect of gravity all the time and have been doing so from the beginning. Most of our lives we hate it too because we dream of flying but earth's gravity does not allow us to do that. But it is very important as it has contributed in shaping the world and every living and non-living thing on it, either direcly or indirectly. If the gravity of earth was even slightly different then everything might have been different. Even the working of our internal organs is linked to the earth's gravity. What is gravity? The early humans didn't know about gravity but they did know that it was not good to fall down. Over time humans tried to understand it, from ancient greek philosophers to the famous story of Isaac Newton watching an apple fall from a tree which lead to his universal law of gravitation. According to this law 2 objects will exert force on each other called the gravitational force. This gravitational force is directly proportiona...

Simulation of Spiralling black holes. Credits: NASA Goddard Black holes are the densest objects in the universe, so dense in fact that they warp spacetime itself. They can even trap light, the fastest thing in the universe, hence the name black hole. But enough about that, I'm sure most of you are already familiar with all of this. But what happens when such dense objects with mass ranging from tens of times upto billions of times that of our sun? Well in May 2019 such a collision was detected between 2 Stellar mass black holes and after going through all the information researchers are now saying that after the big bang it is the biggest bang that has been observed. Because the detectors can pick up the gravitational waves as sound the collision was actually heard as a thud. Another interesting thing about this collision is that previously there were 2 kinds of black holes known to us, Stellar mass black holes and Super massive black holes. This particular merger was exciting in a...

Image taken from pixabay. One of the most popular subjects nowadays is colonizing space, Moon and Mars seem to be the most likely candidates initially. As humans develop better means of space travel, naturally it appears to be  the next step in the human race's evolution and it is vital especially for exploration purposes. It will help us to further develop our understanding of other planets by conducting detailed research by physically being there. One-way trip? Yes, it seems that the early missions will be one-way. It shouldn't come as a surprise because launching safely even from the surface of earth is quite challenging and takes alot of preparation, many missions have failed due to small problems and even lives have been lost. To escape earth's gravity and go into space huge rocket boosters are required. Once in space the boosters separate from the main craft as they are no longer required in space. Also, because all the fuel in the boosters is consumed as escaping the...