astronomer
These last years, the search for extrasolar planets has been successful. To date, the astronomers have detected more than 300 extrasolar planets. Among these 300 planets, only ten have been discovered by their own light.
There is perhaps a phenomenon which could facilitate this search for extrasolar planets.
During the last two decades, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. New research indicates they might have found even more except for one thing - some planets have fallen into their stars and simply no longer exist.
Having written a biography of planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel for young readers, I was delighted to learn of the launch of a program called "She Is An Astronomer" as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - A team led by an Indiana University astronomer has found a sample of massive galaxies with properties that suggest that they may have formed relatively recently. This would run counter to the widely-held belief that massive, luminous galaxies (like our own Milky Way Galaxy) began their formation and evolution shortly after the Big Bang, some 13 billion years ago.
Summary
Information about science and technology in ancient India are given.
The internet links for additional information are also provided.
1. INTRODUCTION
Men of older generation used to say that all knowledge is
there in the Vedas. Anyone who hears such words will have
the first reaction that it is an over confident statement.
On long, dark winter nights, the constellation of Orion the Hunter dominates the sky. Within the Hunter's sword, the Orion Nebula swaddles a cluster of newborn stars called the Trapezium. These stars are young but powerful, each one shining with the brilliance of 100,000 Suns. They are also massive, containing 15 to 30 times as much material as the Sun.
Future telescopes, with mirrors half the size of a football field, will need special components to deal with the light they collect.
In 1996, a 7-year-old boy in China bent over the eyepiece of a small telescope and saw something that would change his life--a comet of flamboyant beauty, bright and puffy with an active tail.
The principle behind whispering galleries -- where words spoken softly beneath a domed ceiling or in a vault can be clearly heard on the opposite side of the chamber -- has been used to achieve what could prove to be a significant breakthrough in the miniaturization of lasers.
Hubble Space Telescope data, analyzed by a Yale astronomer using gravitational lensing techniques, has generated a spatial map demonstrating the clumped substructure of dark matter inside clusters of galaxies. Clusters of galaxies (about a million, million times the mass of our sun), are typically made up of hundreds of galaxies bound together by gravity. About 90 percent of their mass is dark matter. The rest is ordinary atoms in the form of hot gas and stars.
A popular saying states that when you see a meteor, you may make a wish. While astronomers cannot promise that it will be realised, a team of astronomers have indeed seen a dream come true! On May 12, 2002, they were lucky to record the spectrum of a bright meteor when it happened - by sheer chance and against all reasonable odds - to cross the narrow slit of the FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope.
A faint star nearly 2,000 light-years away now has something in common with our sun that no other single star has. An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have directly measured the mass of that star -- the first time such a feat has been accomplished for any single star other than our own sun. Until now, scientists could only measure the mass of other stars that were part of binary (two-star) systems, so this new research may better answer questions about singular stars like the sun.
A University of Arizona astronomer and his collaborators are using a novel camera to hunt for extrasolar planets. Their camera has already made stunning images of Saturn's moon, Titan, and discovered an object just 27 times the mass of Jupiter. They hope the camera will be the first to directly photograph faint gas-giants similar to Jupiter in solar systems beyond our own.
The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer Galileo, found volcanic hot spots with temperatures as high as 2,910 Fahrenheit (1,610 Celsius).
Twenty years ago, astronomers discovered a number of enigmatic radio-emitting filaments concentrated near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These features initially defied explanation, but a new study of radio images of the Galactic center may point to their possible source. By combining data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomer Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University has found evidence that at least some of the filaments spring from the concentrated star-formation regions that populate the Galactic center.
