Thought Of The Day

somewhere in some unknown but yet in a definite epoch, an unimaginable event happened in an unimaginable distance away and we are just feeling the faint ripples of it. Probably ripple isn't even a right word for it.

Last month researchers said they had felt space-time vibrations from the merger of a pair of mammoth black holes merging together in the universe. These space-time vibrations are also called as gravitation waves. In this event, some 3 billion light-years away, so technically it happened 3 billion years ago, a black hole 19 times the mass of the sun and another black hole 31 times the sun’s mass, married to make a single hole of 49 solar masses. During the last moments of this epic merger, they were shedding more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe. These waves of energy, traveled 3 billion light years (in kilometer that would be 3 followed by twenty-two zeros if you want to get some banal earthly perspective) to reach us now, and these waves have so much energy that after travelling so far away in time and distance that it was still able to jiggle LIGO’s mirrors back and forth by a fraction of an atomic diameter 20 times a second.

Something that happened so so long ago and so so far away and was so so massive that it is still causing a shock wave to boom across the cosmos. Everything about it breaks our notion of the 'reality' around us? If you think hard about it, one can not but stop and wonder how to make any sense of it. What does this tell us about us, about our seemingly busy lives, about this modest place we call home, about God, about the whole universe that is just a small speck in an all consuming cosmic darkness. Should we feel proud that we are out there intelligent enough to see and make sense of such colossal mayhem playing out or should we despair at thought of the randomness or chance of our existence or of being alone in this cold frigid corner of the cosmos. I mean if you can grapple with what above has happened, shouldn't it be as Carl Sagan said "a humbling and character-building experience."

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.   ---- Carl Sagan

The original article is here.

Here is a nice video of how LIGO works. (courtesy NY Times)

Photo Of The Day

This is the photo taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft that is currently programmed to be crashed into Saturn later this year. What we see here is planet earth as a bright dot between the icy rings of Saturn. If you look closely at the Earth (the bright dot), you will see a very faint dot left of our planet's bright dot. That is our moon. Cassini was 1.4 billion kilometers away from Earth when this image was taken.

We have come very away from home. We have come very very far away from where we started. I wish my eyes could see the full potential of how far we can go and how many new suns and new worlds we could see and fathom from our humble eyes. I wish I could imbibe the enormity of what we are part of. I wish to see finally that we are not alone.. I so wish..

Photo Of The Day

Trilobite 450 Million Years Old (Cambrian Period)

Nautiloids/Ammonoids 450 Million Years Old (Devonian Period)

Nothosaurus 250 Million Years Old (Triassic Period)

All these fossil pictures have been taken at - Australian Fossil and Mineral Museum, Bathurst, NSW

Photo Of The Day

Lagoon Nebula (camera connected to 20" telescope using adapter, Taken in Dubbo Observatory)
30 second camera exposure

Milky Way Galaxy (Taken in Dubbo)
25 second camera exposure

Video Of The Day

NYTimes has come up with a simple to understand five minute video to explain the science and the method behind the discovery of Gravitational Waves by LIGO. Fascinating watch!

The main article on this topic in nytimes is here

Thought Of The Day

God's particle unknown and heavier relative is close to being discovered!

The brilliant minds at CERN are rechecking their data on this for now. It has been a while since Higgs boson was confirmed by CERN. At that time it was called the God's particle in the media. Now CERN is running particle beams at 6.5 trillion electron volt (TeV) per beam, nearly double the energy of the beam they were used to find the elusive Higgs boson. With updated hardware and double the energy, they have just discovered a bump in the data. Bump! Now that is a quaint word. It has a nice little ring to it as if master Yoda from star wars discovered an anomaly in the Force. The CERN experiment's idea being as beam's TeV rise, the more energy gets converted into mass and by Einstein famous equation, the heavier particle gets released and this is recorded as a bump. By the way, CERN can go all the way to 13 TeV so by the time CERN is exhausted of it capability, God's particle may have a new family by then.. Each unique and infinitely fascinating with a story to tell.. God should be proud of Himself...

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' " 

-- Carl Sagan 

Pure Engineering!

This is what we call engineering at its best. The best minds out there describe the challenges that NASA's Curiosity rover is going to face in its last moments of descent on the Martian surface when it lands in the first week of August this year. Seriously that is some feat and yes, Best of luck for the landing!

Eye On The Space

i was reading Time.com's Eye On Science and found this interesting NASA mission that they have put up in the skies above us.... Its called GRACE aka. Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment.

The GRACE mission will have two identical spacecrafts flying about 220 kilometers apart in a polar orbit 500 kilometers above the Earth. it will map the Earth's gravity fields by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. The gravity variations that GRACE will study include: changes due to surface and deep currents in the ocean; runoff and ground water storage on land masses; exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans; and variations of mass within the Earth... (This will be crucial when you will consider the mass difference that will happen due to the speeding up of melting of the polar ice caps.. such information will provide an undeniable evidence to the rejectionists that Global Warming is for real.... )

GRACE will obtain a gravity field map by looking at how the Earth's mass varies from place to place on the surface as the twin satellites pass over.Since the Earth has varied topographic features such as mountains, valleys, and underground caverns, the mass is not evenly distributed around the globe and different physical features can be distinguished. The lumps observed in the Earth's gravity field result from this uneven distribution of mass on the Earth's surface and GRACE will map these perturbations with unprecedented accuracy.Here's an example of how it works. The two GRACE satellites are traveling in space, both 500 kilometers above the earth. As the front satellite approaches an area of higher gravity, it will be pulled toward the area of higher gravity and speed up. This increases the distance betweenthe two satellites. As the satellites straddle the area of higher gravity, the front satellite will slow down and the trailing satellite will speed up. As the trailing satellite passes the area of higher gravity, it will slow down and the lead satellite will not be affected. As the satellites move around the Earth, the speeding up and slowing down of the satellites will allow scientists to measure the distance between the two satellites, and, therefore, map the earth's gravity field.

You can read full artice relating to GRACE MISSION and its objectives at the GRACE webpage

~These Boots Are Made For Walking~