Space wonder

 titleIs there sound in Space? There is no sound in space. Sound, like light or heat, is a wave. However, one major distinction is that, unlike light or heat (radiation), sound needs a medium to travel. Sounds require the presence of molecules or particles to travel from one region to a different . Armageddon is, by quite thick margin, if not the foremost , then one among the foremost heedlessly written, hilariously scientifically inaccurate movies of all time. Scientists either roll their eyes, wince or writhe watching the unintentional parody that's this movie. atomic explosion to destroy an asteroid, drilling in space, debris burning on the asteroid with none oxygen, casting Liv Tyler and engine sounds in space. Another movie that creates the last mistake i discussed is Star Wars. The boom! sound of a spaceship exploding and being reduced to shreds or the whoosh! and pew! sounds of laser blasters causing the explosion itself are blasphemous within the doctrine of sc...

If the Sun Is ablaze , How Does It Get Oxygen? How Does It Get Oxygen? credit:NASA Though pictures of the sun sure look fiery, the sun isn't ablaze the way you would possibly think, as when paper burns. When a bit of paper is about ablaze with a match, the atoms (mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) within the chemical compounds within the paper combine with the molecules of oxygen within the atmosphere to supply the chemical compounds CO2 and water and to release heat and lightweight . this is often a reaction that we call combustion. The sun is completing a way different process called fusion . Each second the sun converts 700,000,000 plenty of the element hydrogen into 695,000,000 plenty of the element helium. This releases energy within the sort of gamma rays. The gamma rays are mostly converted to light eventually. This process doesn't require oxygen. It does require incredibly high temperatures and pressures.

The proxima centauri ..... proximal centaur I  The star Proxima isn’t visible to the attention , but it’s one among the foremost noted stars in Earth’s sky. That’s because it's considered to be a part of the Alpha Centauri star system, a triple system, and therefore the nearest star system to our sun. Of the three stars in Alpha Centauri , Proxima is assumed to be the one actually closest to our sun, at 4.22 light-years away. The image above – from the Hubble Space Telescope – is one among the simplest we’ve seen at showing Proxima clearly. proxima centauri  If it’s so nearby, why can’t we see Proxima with the eye? It’s because Proxima is so small. It’s a red dwarf star star with only about an eighth of the mass of the sun. Faint red Proxima – at only 3,100 degrees K (5,120 F) and 500 times less bright than our sun – is almost a fifth of a light-year from Alpha Centauri A and B. This great distance from the 2 primary stars within the system is what calls int...

Interstellar dust Only about 0.7 percent of the mass of the  interstellar space  is  within the  sort of  solid grains, but these grains have a profound effect on the physical conditions within the gas. Their main effect is  to soak up  stellar radiation; for photons unable to ionize hydrogen and for wavelengths outside absorption lines or bands, the dust grains are  far more  opaque than the gas. The dust absorption increases with photon energy, so long-wavelength radiation (radio and far-infrared) can penetrate dust freely, near-infrared  very well  , and ultraviolet relatively poorly. Dark, cold molecular clouds, within which all star formation takes place, owe their existence to dust. Besides absorbing starlight, the dust acts to heat the gas under some conditions (by ejecting electrons produced by the photoelectric effect, following the absorption of a stellar photon) and  to chill  the gas under other conditions ...

How NASA Will Protect Astronauts From Space Radiation at the Moon August 1972, as NASA scientist Ian Richardson remembers it, was hot. In Surrey, England, where he grew up, the fields were brown and dry, and other people tried to remain indoors — out of the Sun, televisions on. except for several days that month, his TV picture kept ending . “Do not adjust your set,” he recalls the BBC announcing. “Heat isn’t causing the interference. It’s sunspots.” The same sunspots that disrupted the tv signals led to enormous solar flares — powerful bursts of energy from the Sun — Aug. 4-7 that year. Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the solar eruptions were a mishap for lunar explorers. Had they been in orbit or on the Moon’s surface, they might have experienced high levels of radiation sparked by the eruptions. Today, the Apollo-era flares function a reminder of the threat of radiation exposure to technology and astronauts in space. Understanding and predicting solar eruptions is cru...

× Has anyone ever died in space? A total of 18 people have lost their lives either while in space or in preparation for an area mission, in four separate incidents. Given the risks involved in space flight, this number is surprisingly low. The two worst disasters both involved NASA’s spacecraft . On 28 January 1986 the Challenger spacecraft blew up 73 seconds after take-off, due to a failure on a sealant ring that allowed hot gas from the boosters wont to lift the craft within the first two minutes of flight to hit the large main external tanks containing hydrogen-oxygen fuel. All seven crew members died, including Christa McAuliffe, an educator from New Hampshire selected on a special NASA programme to bring civilians into space. The Challenger disaster remains perhaps the foremost notorious within the history of spaceflight, due to the amount of individuals , many of them schoolchildren, who saw it survive TV. In 2003 an extra seven astronauts died when the shuttle Columbia bro...

The term “moonshot” is usually invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the primary human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to visit the closest stars. The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a news conference joined by renowned physicists including Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the present vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails are going to be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail. After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft are going to be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand-fold faster than any macroscopi...

 How space exploration will help us in future?  The process of assembling the International space platform (ISS) started in 1998 and was completed in 2011, with five partners involved: Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and therefore the us . It was initially planned to work only until the year 2020, but in 2014 the US decided to increase its life until 2024. Since then Russia has proposed to increase further the lifetime of the ISS to 2028, and therefore the US space agency NASA seemed able to accept this new extension. However, major space policy changes happened within the US in 2017, with the revival of a high-level White House body, the National Space Council (NSpC), chaired by the vice chairman . The new priority of the White home is a return to the Moon within the 2020s, as a step towards Mars within the 2030s. In order to free funds for this new strategy, the NSpC favours an end-of-life of the ISS in 2025. A compromise with Congress will likely cause the choi...

Dying stars breathe life into Earth: study As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos through the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many various chemical elements, including carbon. Findings from a study published today in Nature Astronomy show that the ultimate breaths of those dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbon's origin within the Milky Way . "The findings pose new, stringent constraints on how and when carbon was produced by stars of our galaxy, ending up within the staple from which the Sun and its planetary system were formed 4.6 billion years ago," says Jeffrey Cummings, an Associate Research Scientist within the Johns Hopkins University's Department of Physics & Astronomy and an author on the paper. The origin of carbon, a component essential to life on Earth, within the Milky Way galaxy remains debated amo...

Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?  Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?  A rotating region is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it's only natural to ask whether black holes might be used as some kind of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a way to try to to just this, now referred to as the "Penrose Process." The method might be employed by sophisticated civilizations (aliens or future humans) to reap energy by making "black hole bombs." a number of the physics required to try to to so, however, had never been experimentally verified — so far . Our study confirming the underlying physics has just been published in Nature Physics. Around its event horizon (the boundary around a region beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape), a rotating region creates a neighborhood called the "ergosphere." If an object falls into the ergosphere...

  what is the big bang theory ? The big bang  The Big Bang Theory is that the leading explanation about how the universe began. At its simplest, it says the universe as we all know it started with alittle singularity, then inflated over subsequent 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we all know today. Because current instruments don't allow astronomers to see back at the universe's birth, much of what we understand about the large Bang Theory comes from mathematical formulas and models. Astronomers can, however, see the "echo" of the expansion through a phenomenon referred to as the cosmic microwave background. While the bulk of the astronomical community accepts the idea , there are some theorists who have alternative explanations besides the large Bang — like eternal inflation or an oscillating universe. The phrase "Big Bang Theory" has been popular among astrophysicists for many years , but it hit the mainstream in 2007 when a comedy show w...

Gravitational wave  Ripples in space itself have revealed a merger of an outsized region with an object thought to be too small to be a region .  Gravitational wave detectors have spotted a cosmic collision during which an enormous region swallowed up a mystery object seemingly too heavy to be a star , but too light to be a region . Weighing in at 2.6 times the mass of the Sun, the thing falls into a hypothetical “mass gap,” a desert between the heaviest star and therefore the lightest region that some theories predict—suggesting the gap doesn’t exist which those theories got to be amended. “People who thought there was a mass gap will need to rethink it, for sure,” says Cole Miller, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who wasn't involved within the observation. He adds, however, “People aren’t getting to be joining cults because they can't survive this alteration in their worldview.” The data come from physicists working with the Laser...