Discovering the first true "alien Earth" is a long-held dream of astronomers — and recent exoplanet discoveries have shown that small, rocky worlds like our own are abundant in the galaxy. Let’s look at some of the closest known analogues to our home planet.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was an observatory in space dedicated to finding planets outside our solar system, with a particular focus on finding planets that might resemble Earth.
NASA's Curiosity rover is currently roaming Mars' landscape looking for signs of life and learning about the Red Planet's unique environment. Curiosity has four main science goals: Determine whether life ever arose on Mars. Characterize the climate of Mars. Characterize the geology of Mars. Prepare for human exploration.
Remote sensing is the acquiring of information from a distance. NASA observes Earth and other planetary bodies via remote sensors on satellites and aircraft that detect and record reflected or emitted energy.
Quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our sun, Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them. These powerful dynamos have fascinated astronomers since their discovery half a century ago.
Asteroids are rocky objects revolving around the sun that are too small to be called planets. They are also known as planetoids or minor planets. There are millions of asteroids, ranging in size from hundreds of miles to several feet across.
Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles.
Everywhere we point telescopes in the sky, we see galaxies, going back to the earliest moments in history where galaxies could even exist. These galaxies fall into a pattern: large scale structure of the Universe.
Astrophysical fluid dynamics is a modern branch of astronomy involving fluid mechanics which deals with the motion of fluids, like the gases which the stars are made up of or any fluid which is found in outer space.
The sky above us is strewn with alluringly beautiful remnants of ancient supernovae, that is, stars that lived out their lives and then died in these violent explosions. A supernova is a name given to the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star at the end of its life.
The universe developed from a tiny speck (hypothetically containing the entirety of space) into something much, much bigger. Cosmic inflation explains how this occurred uniformly in spite of the rapidness of the process.
Gravity is one of the universe's fundamental forces and dominates every moment of our conscious experience. It keeps us close to the ground, drags baseballs and basketballs out of the air and gives our muscles something to struggle against. Cosmically, gravity is just as consequential.
Optical astronomy refers to an area of astronomy where astronomers observe and analyze light from the Universe that falls within the wavelength range that the human eye is sensitive to, using telescopes.
A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Nebulae exist in the space between the stars—also known as interstellar space. The closest known nebula to Earth is called the Helix Nebula.
A cosmological model is a mathematical description of the Universe that attempts to explain its current behaviour and evolution over time. Cosmological models are based on direct observations.
Relativity is the notion that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. We here on Earth obey the same laws of light and gravity as someone in a far-off corner of the universe.
Astroparticle physics looks at the most basic building blocks in nature to learn more about how they work. By studying particles from the universe we can learn more about how it was formed and hopefully start to answer big questions
Physical cosmology, as a branch of astronomy, is the study of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and is concerned with fundamental questions about its formation and evolution. Quantum cosmology is the attempt in theoretical physics to develop a quantum theory of the Universe. This approach attempts to answer open questions of classical physical cosmology, particularly those related to the first phases of the universe.
Stellar dynamics is the branch of astrophysics which describes the collective motions of stars subject to their mutual gravity in a statistical way. That is, it describes systems of many point mass particles whose mutual gravitational interactions determine their orbits.
Magnetohydrodynamics is one of the interesting sub-branch of physics, where we analyse fluid dynamics with the help of magnetic effects. MHD is the marriage of hydrodynamics to electromagnetism.
Of nature's four fundamental forces, gravity is the most innately experienced. From their earliest self-directed moments, tiny children will marvel at how the dropped block — or, to parents' exasperation — the spilled drink falls to the floor. Gravity, we quickly come to learn, is a fact of life, inviolable and unstoppable.
Quantum entanglement is one of the most bizarre phenomena seen at very tiny, subatomic scales. When two or more particles link up in a certain way, no matter how far apart they are in space, their states remain linked. a single mathematical "container" can describe all particles simultaneously, regardless of their individual properties. This unified state would become known as quantum entanglement.
The northern lights, or the aurora borealis, are beautiful dancing waves of light that have captivated people for millennia. But for all its beauty, this spectacular light show is a rather violent event. Auroras are the result of disturbances in the magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. These disturbances alter the trajectories of charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma.
In our "Hello, Astrophysicist!" segment, we interact with some of the finest Astrophysicists and talk about lots of exciting and informative stuff. In the first episode, we featured Prof. Debarati Chatterjee, a theoretical Astrophysicist, Associate Professor at IUCAA, and the Chairperson of LIGO-India Outreach. Her research focuses on Compact Objects, specifically Neutron Stars, and she tries to understand the mysterious behavior of these celestial objects that are a source of Gravitational Wave...
Betelgeuse is classified as a red supergiant of spectral type M1-2 and is one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye. A supernova is the explosive death of a star in an event so violent that for a brief period that single star shines as brightly as a whole galaxy of more than a hundred billion ordinary stars like the Sun. This is a relatively rare event. When this happens, Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months, perhaps becoming as bright as the full moon, and be vi...
Extraterrestrial life/intelligent life sometimes colloquially referred to as alien life, is hypothetical life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. For millennia, humans have gazed in wonder at the stars, trying to understand their nature and importance. We developed telescopes only a few hundred years ago, and since then the dimensions of our observable universe have expanded exponentially with technological advances and the insights of quantum physics and relativit...
The expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between any two given gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. An extra dose of dark energy in the early universe, dubbed early dark energy, could reconcile the conflicting values of the Hubble constant. The outward pressure of this early dark energy would have sped up the universe’s expansion.
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the creation (nucleosynthesis) of chemical elements by nuclear fusion reactions within stars. Stellar nucleosynthesis has occurred since the original creation of hydrogen, helium, and lithium during the Big Bang.
2021 REWIND of the highlights from the field of astronomy. Gravitational lensing: When light passes one of these objects, such as a cluster of galaxies, its path is changed slightly. This effect, called gravitational lensing, is only visible in rare cases and only the best telescopes can observe the related phenomena. Smaller objects, like individual stars, can also act as gravitational lenses when they pass in front of more distant stars.
