Facts on Fire

   While people are celebrating Halloween, NASA released an astonishing picture of   'Giant Space Pumpkin ' captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.  While sharing the pictures of the ' Giant Space Pumpkin ', NASA wrote, "Sorry Charlie Brown, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is taking a peek at what might best be described as the " Greater Pumpkin " . This is a Hubble Space Telescope snapshot of the early stages of a collision between two galaxies that resembles a Halloween carved pumpkin. The "pumpkin's" glowing “eyes” are the bright, star-filled cores of each galaxy that contain supermassive black holes. An arm of newly forming stars give the imaginary pumpkin a wry smirk. The two galaxies, cataloged as NGC  2292 and NGC  2293, are located about 120 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. Credits:  NASA, ESA, and W. Keel (University of Alabama) The pumpkin’s face consists of two Aging Red Stars , which forms the eye, ...

Our Sun is orbited by a lovely array of planets and they are widely diverse- big, small, airless, rocky, gaseous, hot, cold, and more. That makes us think that may be forming planets is easy with so many varieties to choose from. Even if making planets is hard, there are so many stars in the sky that it’s hard to believe our sun is the only one. Astronomers have fretted over this for a long time, but trying to find such planets is hard. The biggest problem is any such planets would be faint, far away from being able to see one in a telescope would be like trying to spot a firefly sitting next to a searchlight. Imagine two kids, one big and one small, facing each other. They clasp hands and start to spin around. As they do, the little kid, who weigh less, will make a big circle, and the bigger kid will make a small circle. The same would be true of a star and planet. As the planets orbit the star, it makes a big circle or ellipse. But the planets have gravity and it ...

At first, glance stars pretty much all look alike. Twinkling dots scattered across the sky. When we look closely we see the difference. Some look brighter and some look dull, sometimes that due to them being at different distances but it’s also true that stars emit a different amount of light too. If we look through Binoculars or take pictures of them, we'll see that they're all different colors, too. Some looks white and some looks red, orange. A spectrum is a result when we divide the incoming light from an object into individual colors or wavelengths. This reveals the vast amount of physical data about the object. But in the late 1800s we were only starting to figure out, Interpreting stellar spectra was a tough problem. The spectra we measure from the star are a combination of two different kinds of spectra. Stars are hot, dense balls of gas, so they give off a continuous spectrum; that is they emit light of all wavelengths. However, stars also have an atmosph...

Everything we understand about the Universe comes from light emitted or reflected by objects. It'd be nice if we could get actual samples from them: physical specimens we examine in the lab. Well, sometimes the Universe can be accommodating and allows us to hold it in our hands. If we go outside on a clear dark, moonless night chances are very good if we see a shooting star. A fiery dot leaving a long glowing trail behind it. What we’re actually seeing is a tiny bit of interplanetary debris: rock, Ice or Metal ramming through the Earth’s atmosphere, heated to incandescence. Most are faint but some can be astonishing bright. Shooting stars aren’t actually stars, Sometimes it seems like astronomers use different names for objects to keep things as confusing as possible. In this case, the actual bit of solid stuff coming from space called Meteoroids . The phenomena of the meteoroid getting hot and blazing across the sky are called Meteor and when it hits the ground, we...

The empty space past Neptune isn't exactly empty. We know that comets come in two varieties: Those with orbit periods of less than 200 years, which tends to orbit the sun in the same plane as the planets, and those with longer periods which have orbit tilted everyway. This is something of a problem: comets lose material when they get near the Sun. Over the course of millions of years, these comets should evaporate! And yet here we are 4.56 billion years after the solar system's birth and comets still appear in our skies.  Where the comet come from? 4.5 Billion years ago our solar system formed. Coalescing our of a flat disk of material around the sun, the inner planets were warmer, smaller and rocky while the outer planets were in a region that was colder, and grew huge. Out there in the chillier part of the solar system, water comes in the form of ice mixed in with dust and other stuff. These bits would collide and stick together, growing bigger. Some g...

Comets                                                                                                                                                                      Comets have been seen in the sky since antiquity. Comets Halley, for example, is shown in the Bayern Tapestry, which depicts the Norman Invasion of the British Isles in the year 1066. It was seen by Ancient Chinese and Greek too. In general, and like everything else in the sky, comets were consider omen or Harbingers of human events. Sometimes they were good omens. William the Conqueror liked ...

Asteroids  When we look at the diagram of the solar system, we'll see a big gap between Mars and Jupiter. A few centuries ago, that bugged Astronomer; they really wanted to be a planet there. On the first day of the 19th century January-1, 1801 Italian Astronomer Guiseppi Piazzi found a point of light moving at just the right speed to be the desired planet, but it was just a dot, and too faint to physically to be a terribly big object. He suspected it might be a comet, but follow up observations showed up it wasn't fuzzy. The object was given the name Ceres. A little over a year in 1802, another one was found then in 1804, astronomer spotted a third one and the fourth one in 1807. It was becoming clear that a new class of solar system object had been discovered. Given they were all dots in the telescope of the time, points of light like stars. They were given the name " Asteroids " which literally mean star-like. By the end of the 19th century, m...

String Theory  To understand the true nature of reality, we looked up at the things which were amazed- Wonderous landscapes in the dust, Zoos of bizarre creatures, complex proteins robots etc. All of them made from the structure of molecules made up of countless even smaller things; atoms. We thought they were the final layer of reality until we smashed them together really hard and discovered things that can't be divided, anyone; Elementary particles: But we had a problem with them. They are so small that we could not look at them. To see something, we need to light an electromagnetic wave. This wave hits the surface of the object and gets reflected from it to the eye and this is not the problem with most of the things. But this particles is very very small so small that the electromagnetic waves we used to see are too big to touch them visible light just passes over them. We can try to solve this by creating Electromagnetic waves of much smaller wavelength, B...

Black Hole Information Paradox Before 14 Sept 2015, There was a question mark on the existence of black holes because before that they only exist in our theories and some researchers believed that there is nothing like the black hole in Universe.  But at 14 Sept 2015, Ligo first detected the gravitational waves and it is proved that the black holes are not imaginary, they exist in the universe. And now we know that black holes exist but we have not fully understood it, because of this we don't know how this universe actually works. If we want to know how our universe actually works then we have to know that black holes works and that's the biggest reason why Physicists gave importance to it.  Before 1974, Black holes are not considered to be paradoxical because then we know that black holes are such places in our universe in which gravitational forces are much stronger than any other region in our universe and even light couldn't escape through it. ...

Hawking's Radiation Black holes: What is Blackhole?, What we know about black holes? How they work?, Is there is any black hole in our Universe. All these questions annoying physicist for the last 5 decades. We all know that Event horizon is Point of no return in black holes. In Actual, Event horizon is a boundary of black hole outside the event horizon an object can pass unless it faces the gravitational pull from the black hole, but if an object crosses the boundary of event horizon then it becomes impossible for an object to escapes from its strong gravitational pull, Even light cannot be able to escape from its strong gravitational pull. Normally, when we are talking about strong gravitational pull actually we're talking about the boundary of the Event horizon. Stephan Hawkings first discovered that light rays which enter event horizon and light rays which are outside the event horizon doesn't approach each other. It means that the area of even...

We humans of planet Earth benefit from a great coincidence. It's a coincidence of time, and of space and of maths. The coincidence is this: the sun is about 400 times wider than the moon and it's also an average of about 400 times farther away from the moon. The apparent size of the object in the sky depends upon how far the object is and how big it is. So these numbers being equal means Sun and the Moon means to be about the same size in the sky and that's where another interesting thing comes in: Sometimes the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun. It doesn't happen all that often, but when it does, we get magic, We get an Eclipse. An eclipse is a generic term in astronomy for "when one object passes into the shadow of another object, darkening or blocking it. A solar eclipse happens when the Moon blocks the Sun, casting a shadow on the Earth. A lunar eclipse happens when the Earth blocks the Sun, casting a shadow on the Moon. The Moo...