Monthly Archives: February 2015

SkyView App

Posted on February 14, 2015 by serenakumar

With the prevalence of advanced technology in today’s society, it is no surprise that there have been many mobile applications, or ‘apps’ dedicated towards astronomy that are available to purchase and peruse for astronomy lovers. One app that caught my interest was the SkyView App. The SkyView App is free on iTunes and on the… Continue reading →

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The Potsdam Gravity Potato

Posted on February 14, 2015 by revanth111

Source: Universe Today The above picture is a rendering of the Earth’s gravitational field produced by the German Research Center for Geophysics’ Helmholtz’s Center in Potsdam, Germany. Known as the “Gravity Potato,” it shows that the Earth’s gravity is not as uniform as one would think. In fact, the gravitational force is a dynamic surface that […] Continue reading →

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Spectacular arrangement of Mars, Venus and the Moon this week!

Posted on February 14, 2015 by agiantchicken

Check that out! Later on this coming week, it is expected that Mars, Venus, and the Moon will come so close to one another in our sky, that they will be separated by less than a single degree in the sky on February 20! While given the moon’s moves along its orbit rather fast around the […] Continue reading →

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Black Hole!

Posted on February 14, 2015 by newbeelity

A black hole is a mathematically defined region of spacetime exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can escape from it. (Definition from Wikipedia) General relativity indicates that a sufficient density can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which nothing can escape is called the event horizon. It has no detectable features when observing something traveling across an… Continue reading →

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The Dual Nature of Light

Posted on February 14, 2015 by nathanielrabin

One thing that has always fascinated me about light is that is that it has both wave-like properties and particle-like properties. Intuitively, light seems like a wave, and Young’s double slit experiment – which can and has been recreated easily in freshman physics labs – seems to show “definitively” that it is a wave. But […] Continue reading →

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Earth in Infrared

Posted on February 14, 2015 by revanth111

Source: rt.com Two of NASA’s geosynchronous satellites, GOES 13 and GOES 15, have captured infrared light emitted from the Earth, and a University of Victoria graduate student recently used this data to put together a video that shows the behavior of this light over a two month period. Infrared light is generated by heat from the […] Continue reading →

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Special Relativity

Posted on February 14, 2015 by newbeelity

In physics, special relativity (SR, also known as the special theory of relativity or STR) is the accepted physical theory regarding the relationship between space and time.(Definition from Wikipedia) At the end of the 19th century, Maxwell equations of electromagnetism had been proved by plenty of experiments. However, Maxwell equations are not consistent with the Galilean transformations in Newtonian physics. As a result,… Continue reading →

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“Where are they?”

Posted on February 14, 2015 by farhannshabab

Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, was once having a casual conversation on UFO reports with his colleagues during a lunch break at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950. He had exclaimed “Where are they?”, alluding to extraterrestrial life. Fermi was perplexed that despite the large probability of alien life not only existing but also […] Continue reading →

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Tides

Posted on February 14, 2015 by serenakumar

Have you ever been to a beach and wondered why at some times of the day, the ocean water reached further onto the land than at other times of the day?  You may have heard the terms ‘high tide’ and ‘low tide’. Tides are caused by the gravitational force of the sun and moon, as… Continue reading →

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The Search for Life and the (Not So) Habitable Zone

Posted on February 14, 2015 by dillonkoval

The question of other life in the Universe is one that has long plagued scientists and astronomers. The pure size of it makes it supposedly statistically probable that if life can happen on Earth, then it can (and probably does/has) happen elsewhere. Because the only type of life that we know is our own, scientists […] Continue reading →

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