Author Archives: ranibanjarian

i was looking to write something about the surface geography of pluto and came across this article about a cool geographic feature on the surface of pluto! since the flyby, we’ve had a lot of new information to sift through about the distant icy planet, and now we’ve found a new set of tendrils on … Continue reading spider! → Continue reading →

neutron stars are extremely dense stars – perhaps the densest stars in the known universe! – so dense in fact, that a marble-sized serving of neutron star would weigh about the same as 5 trillion tons of earth rock! they can form as a result of the collapse of a giant star in a supernova event. because they … Continue reading love is forever! → Continue reading →

for years people have been advocating for countless alternative ways to generate energy to power our ever-industrializing world (hint: fossil fuels are unsustainable!!) whereas nuclear fission generates massive amounts of electricity by splitting atoms apart but also generating radioactive waste, fusion is incredibly pristine and produces no waste byproducts! it is, after all, the process … Continue reading enough energy to power the world forever → Continue reading →

on my flight back from amsterdam at the end of spring break, i finally had the opportunity and wherewithal to watch the theory of everything, the stephen hawking biopic from a couple of years ago. it got me thinking about a lot of things from my physics education in high school and more recently my pursuit … Continue reading hawking radiation → Continue reading →

gravity has found itself grounded in a great deal of pop culture recently. from depictions in cinematic blockbusters to the recent historic breakthrough at LIGO, gravity has become somewhat of a household/cocktail party topic of conversation. being a physics major, over the years i’ve come to think of cosmological things in visuals, or colors, or little … Continue reading love is in the spacetime → Continue reading →

my little brother wants to be an astronaut and swim in the shadows of titan and calypso in the silk sheen shadow of saturn but sometimes we face-off across the little coffee table with the etch marks i made when i was ten and the ones he made when he was ten. “i have so many questions,” … Continue reading “ask me” → Continue reading →

Let’s talk about Galileo [February 15th, 1564 – January 8th, 1642]. Not only was he a champion of the Copernican heliocentric view of the cosmos; he also discovered four of Jupiter’s moons with his telescope – giving less and less credence to a critics of the heliocentric model because it showed that small objects could … Continue reading a most galilean affair → Continue reading →

Venus is many things. I don’t know much about it besides the fact that it is hot, orange, it’s the second planet in the solar system, and is the goddess of love in Roman mythology. On June 5th, 2012, a couple of days after I graduated from high school, my dad and I woke up at … Continue reading goddess of love → Continue reading →

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke’s third law. I stumbled on a little thing I had posted some time ago, early in September when friendships were still tentative and the air was still crisp. -We spent the weekend in a cabin four dirt trails off the everyday. At night we cracked open … Continue reading magic → Continue reading →

This is me. This blog works. I love science, writing, singing, and enjoying the time I have to spend with my family (because I’m an international student from Lebanon, I don’t have a lot of it!) Continue reading →