Category: Uncategorized

Star light is forever
The light that stars have emitted is still around in the universe. This forms a cosmic ‘fog’ that can be utilized by astronomers to determine the space between stars. These types of things make me wonder if we could make use of this light to do the extraordinary think powering time-travel machines.
Jupiter’s significance and the importance of an asteroid belt
The asteroid belt was key in the formation of life on the early Earth. Asteroids are often thought of as harbingers of danger and this is rightly so. On the other hand, they bring with them the building blocks of life when they impact a planet like ours.
I know that we have only identified a few alien solar systems in what seems to be a sea of them, but in this small number of alien systems there is only a small minority that have an asteroid belt.
Layman’s views on space exploration: A sky diver’s ironic views
Talking about extraterrestrial life and space colonization, here was a rather paradoxical view by Felix Baumgartner. He basically wants us to spend our tax dollars on Earth rather than wasted trips to the Red Planet. But the whole point of a space colony is to safeguard the human race from any trouble that may occur here on Earth and the problem that we face with the depletion of resources.
It is the time to be ambitious rather than pessimistic. If Columbus was a pessimist, then he would have had the attitude of why try to go across a big ocean to get to Asia?

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been great for understanding space and the universe. It was the Hubble and Keck telescopes that have given great insights into the formation of galaxies. Galaxies take ages to mature and this time span is in the billions of years. Being a space enthusiast for so long, this is actually not news to me.

What to watch for tonight?
The Orionid meteor shower will be a sight to see. The Earth is moving through some debris left over by Halley’s Comet in its orbit around our Sun. The debris are moving at speeds of 148,000 mph and the brilliant flash of light we see is due to it burning up in the atmosphere. There is another meteor shower that Halley’s Comet is responsible for and it occurs every summer in May. The shower is best seen by getting away from the city.
Halley’s Comet will next be seen in our skies in 2061.
Mass extinction event attributed to global warming
There was a mass extinction event that happened after the Permian Era. This was about 250 million years ago and was probably the hottest the Earth has ever been. This period of extreme global warming wiped out 95 percent of the species on this planet at the time. Fossil fuels from this period have been examined and the low diversity of live around the time of this extreme global warming confirms this.
The good thing is that the current global warming levels are nowhere near the end-Permian level.

Space shuttle Endeavour
The space shuttle Endeavour is being transported from LAX to the California Science Center. Crowds are snapping pictures of Endeavor, eager to capture a historic moment as the space shuttle moves through the city at a top speed of 2 mph. It is now the new star in LA moving at a slow pace which is a far cry from the way it used to hurtle through space. 
It really seems to make for an out of this world sight. This transport of Endeavour is a huge project costing $10 million with roads and underground utilities being modified to withstand its weight. Everything about Endeavour’s journey has been a once in a lifetime sight starting from its hop-scotch across the country on a Boeing 747 that looked so peculiar.

House- size asteroid
An asteroid the size of a house zipped past the Earth on Friday and it was closer to this planet than the moon. Asteroids have given astronomers enormous insights about our Solar System and this one will be no different. They are also the destroyers of life on Earth and this is the reason why sky watchers keep a look out for them.  
55 Cancri
A super-Earth planet that hurtles around its star is thought to have a pure diamond makeup despite its temperature estimated at about 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit because of its proximity to the sun-like star. The planet, 55 Cancri, is in the constellation of Cancer and in the night sky it is visible to the naked eye.

The satellites around the Earth are going to have come to be very careful as time goes on.
Space debris is the last thing on people’s minds when they watch Satellite TV and look up stuff on their GPS, but using a lot of everyday items such as these will depend on how we take care of the space around us. We don’t want to come to a situation where we are even unable to make a space flight because of the mounting space debris. There is the case of the Chinese blasting their own satellite to show off their anti-satellite capability which has contributed to what has become known as the Kessler Syndrome.

In other space news, the star in the center of the Milky Way will assist astronomers in confirming Albert Einstein’s calculation that black holes warp space and time. There are now two stars that have been found to orbit the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These two stars that have long orbits which are often a number of years long offer a lot of insights to astronomers studying them.
Black holes are incredibly dense and they pull anything into their gravitational pull including light. I want to note here how useful physics and astronomy have been to everyday life and improving living standards. This theory by Einstein has paved the way for the GPS system in every iPhone.
UCLA professor Andrea Ghez who heads the research with a lot of work done in the Keck Observatory has truly been able to make headway into the study of black holes and how they will test Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It was Ghez who discover the massive black hole in the center of our galaxy back in 1998.

Space agencies are seeing further than ever before and it allows us humans to gather valuable knowledge about the beginnings of the universe. The picture by the Hubble Telescope was assembled utilizing Hubble Telescope views over a decade.
The universe is estimated to have a 13.7 billion-year lifespan and the galaxies in the XDF photo go back as much as 13.2 billion years. The Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 were used by Hubble to generate this image. Astronomers are now able to examine the universe by seeing into the depths of space and time.

This has given a lot of insights. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and has been a monumental success. It is anticipated to continue to provide images for us till the year 2018. NASA has already made plans to launch a more advanced telescope to replace Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to provide more insights into the beginnings of the universe and will reveal galaxies that were there when the universe was only a couple of hundred million years old.
Going back to the question of finding life, one thing that I have always believed is the possibility that extra-terrestrials were the cause of life on this planet. There is research that supports this theory and the process is known as lithopanspermia. Astrobiology is a field worth looking into for all you young astronomers, biologists and chemists out there and it was the astrobiology journal that contained this piece by some of the experts.

Next month there is a big decision that has to be made in the world of physics with the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded. But appropriately giving credit for the discovery of the “God Particle” is no easy task. There are whole countries that are clamoring for the physics world to recognize their intellectuals and the contributions they have made. 
A lot of people have difficulty in comprehending the need for space exploration. Here is a fact I’d like to share: four percent of the United States labor force is comprised of scientists and engineers, but they create jobs for the other 96 percent.
Those in the scientific community recognize the significance of this Higgs boson discovery and marvel at what physicists can do by harnessing the Higgs field. For those of you studying physics, this is a new opening for a job related to what you are studying or have studied.

The Higgs Boson, Part I

Video of The Higgs Boson, Part I

The sad thing is that this monumental scientific discovery has failed to gain much traction among the general public. But the information is out there for all to read and understand. The problem is that most Americans aren’t really that interested in these things. There were some interesting ideas on how to promote this discovery with Peter Higgs possibly appearing on the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory being one of them.
I am doing my part here as a physics and astronomy lover and want to state that this Higgs boson discovery definitely ranks up there. 

Since ancient times, people have always dreamt of the Red Planet. When looking at what governments are hoping to do in the future, there is an indication that there could be another space race. This is all very exciting for me, but will it be governments like Japan and Russia that will lead the way or will it be the Americans who will be the pioneers like they always have been?
When looking at the future, you can look at it with a glass half full or half empty. I choose the former and the United States has made strong progress with its $2.5 billion Curiosity Rover mission that a human mission to Mars is being strongly considered by planners and policymakers.

There may be even a colony on Mars by 2060 and this bodes well for a wonderful future sparked by American innovation. The Red Planet has been identified as one of those places in the Universe where human beings could thrive albeit with space suits. But it’s not that easy. For instance, calling the Earth from Mars will be challenging because it could take as much 20 minutes to transmit a single word like “hello.”
But the good thing is that Mars seems to be a lot like home in some ways with its caves, minerals and water. Astronauts are practicing for a mission to Mars with attempts being made like the “Mars 500” that was done by the European Space Agency.
I guess nothing is impossible and we will be able to one day live out the Martian Dream.
 

The Voyager 1 was a very exciting project by NASA that has paid big dividends. The images that it has captured has given us so much knowledge over the years. There is still more to come.
The Voyager 1 will be the first ever manmade object to go beyond the Sun’s sphere of influence. The heliopause is the region that Voyager 1 will cover in the next two years before moving out into the Milky Way. It will be interesting to see what information Voyager 1 can send back to Earth after having done that.

But the Voyager 1 mission is running overtime as it was only expected to last five years. Even the instruments that it has are pretty basic with a computer that has only 68 kilobytes of memory. This is a far cry from the type of technology the Curiosity Mission to the Red Planet possesses. Additionally, the Voyager mission utilized gravity assist that was available through a unique alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that occurs once every 175 years.
The Voyager 1 mission continues to enlighten scientists and astronomers about the solar system. But it is expected to stop functioning in the next decade by 2025. That would be pretty disappointing as the mission is carrying the Voyager Golden Record with the “Sounds of Earth” and other information about the Earth, which Stephen Hawking felt was a bad idea.
I know the Voyager probe has done so much and with all the current problems, I sincerely hope we can get another mission like this done and which can go much further.

George Lucas created the Star Wars saga at a time when Americans were less optimistic with all of the events happening around them like the Watergate Scandal. But the more time goes by, it seems that a lot of the exotic worlds Star Wars showed have been found by astronomers in the Universe.
Tatooine-like planets
Luke Skywalker’s home planet is Tatooine and in the episode, A New Hope, he looks at the sunset which shows two suns. A lot of physicists and astronomers at the time thought this was a wild depiction, but it turns out that the Universe has this too and these worlds are not rare.
Saturn’s moon Mimas: The fictional death star
Mimas has a very big, circular crater that resembles quite extraordinarily the Star Wars’ Death Star’s “superlaser focus lens.”

The large asteroid Vesta
There are more Star Wars like worlds in our own backyard. The Millenium Falcon was flown into an asteroid by Han Solo in “The Empire Strikes Back” so that it could be concealed from the Empire’s thugs. Our solar system has a large asteroid with craters and pits called Vesta that could do the same for Han.
CoRoT – 7b: Planet Mustafar
In “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith”, there is a volcanic planet where Darth Vader who takes the form of Anakin Skywalker has a duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Planet CoRoT-7b  is about 480 light years away and is believed to have several volcanoes that erupt all the time.
The gas giant Bespin in “The Empire Strikes Back”
This gas giant Bespin in the Star Wars series can be likened to the gas giants exo-planets that have been discovered that orbit very close to their respective stars.
Dr. Michio Kaku had stated that sometimes whatever we imagine could possibly be found in the Universe.

Neil Armstrong has inspired generations of Americans with the moon landing. We, as people, are still waiting for a similar feat. The landing of the Mars Rover Curiosity has reignited hopes that humans will set foot on the Red Planet.
The moon landing and the first atomic bomb will go down as the two significant happenings for mankind in the 20th century. Furthermore, it is a ‘giant step for mankind’ and will go down in history like the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The thing that was significant was that it was not just celebrated as an indicator of American technological superiority, but for the people of planet Earth as a whole.

Neil Armstrong was known for his humility and he was also a very private person. It was by some sheer luck that Armstrong set foot on the moon first and it was also after a journey that almost ended in a disaster. Armstrong could have capitalized on this once in a millennium adventure to get more riches and fame, but he instead chose privacy and doing something he enjoyed.
I am sure that Neil Armstrong will want the American people to be as optimistic as they were back in the 60s when the moon landing was announced for the world to see. Nowadays, it is hard to sell people on the American dream and what technology and innovation can do for a country. But I think Armstrong’s death is a great time to reflect.
It was after all President John F. Kennedy’s vision to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade that propelled so many brilliant minds to action to manifest something that was thought impossible at the time.