As the astronomers world over are gearing up for a night of shiny objects falling from sky, lets take a look at what these shiny objects really are.

Meteors are the small space debris, rocks, dust and so on, which, on entering Earth’s atmosphere, burn up due to friction from atmosphere, and appear as a short streak of light across the sky. If any of them are large enough to reach the Earth before completely vapourising in the atmosphere, they are called meteorites.

Now the question arises – with something as unpredictable as dust and debris, why do we have annual meteor showers at the same time of the year every year? As it turns out, everything in space, with interaction of various gravity fields and fixed paths, is predictable. We all know that solar system has objects known as comets, moving in highly elliptical orbits and cutting through orbits of most other planets.

When a comet comes close to Sun, it forms two tails, gas and dust tail, away from Sun. These tails basically consist of burning matter, and leave debris and dust along its path. Since the orbit of Earth is fixed, and the orbit of comet is fixed, each comet has a particular spot on Earth’s orbit with its debris. Hence, when Earth passes through them at the same time every year, causing them to come into Earth’s gravity and hence appear as meteors. As for the names, it refers to the region of the sky or the constellation around which the meteor shower will be centered. Since same constellations at same times each year, again its not difficult to conclude that meteor shower of same names will occur at same time every year.

All the major meteor showers have a parent body. Tonight we have Lyrid meteor showers(constellation Lyra), whose parent body is Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher. It will peak around 3 am tonight.

Another nearby meteor shower is Eta Aquarids, peaking around 4th of May, whose parent body is none other than Halley’s Comet.

For all enthusiasts, happy Lyrids

Written by

Animesh Srivastava

Advisor, Celestia

Exploring the Living Universe

Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe: extraterrestrial life and life on Earth. This interdisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System, field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in outer space.

It deals with three fundamental ideas:

• To understand the origin of life and its evolution.
• To probe for extraterrestrial life, especially intelligent life.
• To understand the future of life on Earth and extraterrestrial life.

EXPLORE ASTRO-BIO only at Storming Aurora 2012!

To talk about all this and more, Storming Aurora brings to you Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya, scientist and head at the Indian Astrobiology Research Centre, IARC. His major area of research is astrobiology. Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya has written many science books and his science write-ups in English, Gujarati & Marathi continue to appear in newspapers, magazines and science journals. He also communicates science through talks and science TV shows. Apart from these, he has been associated with national and international research communities. His research publications are available on the research page of this site, ArXiv and NASA ADS.His major area of research, as you can guess, is astrobiology – the multidisciplinary field of exploring the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe, and the origin of life here at home.His research work includes the implicit suggestion that there is an apparent Cosmic Contact Censorship. It asserts that the factors which make the universe suitable for life also make interaction between the possible different advanced life forms in the universe difficult.

A Hunt for other Habitable Zones:

Astrobiology makes use of a plethora of fields like physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, molecular biology, ecology, planetary science, geography, and geology to investigate the possibility of life on other worlds and help recognize biospheres that might be different from the biosphere on Earth. Earth is the only place in the universe known to harbor life. However, recent advances in planetary science have changed fundamental assumptions about the possibility of life in the universe, raising the estimates of habitable zones around other stars and the search for extraterrestrial microbial life. The possibility of life on Mars, either currently or in the past, is an active area of research.

To further explore astrobiology, grab the chance to listen to and interact with Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya only at the Storming Aurora on November 18, 2012 at BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus.

Written by:

Mihika Dave

The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization. – Carl Sagan

In 1930, Karl Jansky made a serendipitous discovery of radiation coming from the Milky Way, the first ever detection of radio waves from an astronomical object! This gave birth to a new field in astronomy and astrophysics: Radio Astronomy.  Why ‘radio’ astronomy you ask? Well this kind of astronomy allows one to analyze celestial phenomena which are invisible in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves can penetrate dust, and hence are used by scientists to study regions which cannot be studied in the visible spectrum of light.

About 65% of our knowledge about the universe has stemmed from the research done in the field of radio astronomy. The discovery of quasars, pulsars, black holes and the discovery of biochemical hydrogen/carbon molecules are all the result of professional radio astronomy. Even the Cosmic Background Radiation, one of the most compelling evidences for the big bang theory was discovered by radio astronomy.

THE BASICS:

Radio telescopes are able to detect most astronomical objects such as galaxies, nebulae, as well as radio emissions from planets, but they are more commonly used to image objects such as pulsars and quasars. And though people had tried to collect information from radio waves from the sun back in 1860s, they were unsuccessful because of the technical limitations of their equipment.

Wavelengths in the range of 10m – 10mm are used in radio astronomy. There is some distortion in the wavelengths above 20cm which can be rectified using the highly sophisticated instruments employed in the observatories. Radio observatories have two major components, the antennas and the receiver. They can be used either singularly or many of them can be clubbed together and finer results can be achieved by the process of radio interferometry.

RADIO INTERFEROMETRY:

But, here’s the problem. A single telescope is fairly limited and doesn’t allow observers to achieve high resolutions.  This is where interferometry comes into picture. Signals from difference telescopes observing the same object are superposed. The waves that coincide with the same phase add while those with opposite phases cancel each other out. The net result is a higher resolution than what could have been achieved otherwise using a single telescope because of the physical restrains regarding the size of the telescope. Also, in order to produce a high quality image, a large number of different separations between the telescopes might be required.  Telescopes are hence generally located miles apart. At present the field of radio interferometry is being pursued by many organisations across the world. Some of the notable ones are Very Large Array Telescope at New Mexico, USA, Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT, Netherlands) and the proposed Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST, China), etc. Closer to home, Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT, India) is a radio interferometer situated at Pune, Maharashtra.

A RADIO EYE ON THE UNIVERSE: By Dr. Urvashi Rau only at Storming Aurora 2012!

Learn more about this exciting field of research only at Storming Aurora 2012! Dr. Urvashi Rau, Assistant Scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, USA will be joining to tell us about her field of expertise, Image Processing in astronomy and much more.  She completed her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Computer Science from BITS Pilani. She then went on to do her MS in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. After completing her Ph.D. from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT), Socorro, New Mexico, USA she joined the NRAO. You can view her profile by following this link: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~rurvashi/HTMLfiles/AboutMe.html

Written by:

Akshar Gupta

Two things are infinite…first this universe and second the quest of the human mind to know about this ever expanding universe…

Cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation or just inflation is the theorized extremely rapid exponential expansion of the early universe.

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, evolution and expansion. The twentieth century development of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and better astronomical observations of extremely distant objects are said to have led to its beginning. These advances have made it possible to speculate about the origin of the universe, and have allowed scientists to establish the Big Bang Theory as the leading cosmological model. Though some researchers still advocate a handful of alternative cosmologies, cosmologists in general agree that the Big Bang theory best explains observations.

The Story So Far:

If we look at the timeline of inflation or cosmology, the earliest of hypothesis can be traced back to the Mesopotamians in16th century BC and the Vedas in12^th century BC.  Great physicists like Kepler, Newton, and Halley among others had come up with their own theories and hypothesis, but major research in this field was kicked off with Einstein’s   General Theory of Relativity. (At that time, Einstein believed in a static universe, but later found that his original formulation of the theory did not permit it.)

In the 1910s, Vesto Slipher (and later Carl Wilhelm Wirtz) interpreted the red shift of spiral nebulae as a Doppler shift that indicated they were receding from Earth. However, it was difficult to determine the distance to astronomical objects. Neither did he realize that the nebulae were actually galaxies outside the Milky Way, nor did he speculate about the cosmological implications. In 1927, the Belgian Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître independently derived the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker equations and proposed, on the basis of the recession of spiral nebulae, that the universe began with the “explosion” of a “primeval atom”—which was later called the Big Bang.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the spiral nebulae were actually galaxies by determining their distances using measurements of the brightness of Cepheid variable stars. He discovered a relationship between the redshift of a galaxy and its distance and interpreted this as evidence that the galaxies are receding from Earth in every direction at speeds directly proportional to their distance. This fact is now known as Hubble’s law.

Food For Thought:

Given the cosmological principle, Hubble’s law suggested that the universe was expanding. For a number of years the support for these theories was evenly divided. However, the observational evidence began to support the idea that the universe evolved from a hot dense state. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1965 lent strong support to the Big Bang model, and since the precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background by the Cosmic Background Explorer in the early 1990s, few cosmologists have seriously proposed other theories of the origin and evolution of the cosmos!

Dark matter, dark energy, cosmic microwave background…the list is endless…get to know about all this and more from Dr. Subhendra Mohanty only at Storming Aurora 2012, on the 18th of November 2012, only at BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus.

More about inflation and cosmology only at Storming Aurora 2012!

Also a BITSian, Dr. Mohanty completed his mechanical engineering from the Pilani Campus in 1983. He then went on to University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA to complete his MS in physics by 1985 and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA for his Ph.D.
Dr. Mohanty has worked in  the world’s best research institutes like ICTP – International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy (1989-90); CERN-European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland (1991-92), CTS – Cognizant Technology Solutions, Bangalore (1992 -94). He is presenter of many papers in the field Neutrino Physics, Astro-particle Physics and General Relativity and has done tremendous research in the field of Cosmology.  Presently he is working as a professor at PRL Ahmedabad.

Written by:

Prafful Golani

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” – Arthur C Clarke.

For centuries, mankind has looked to the skies and wondered, are we alone in the universe? Is anybody else out there? Leading scientists and experts around the globe have been working relentlessly for years, to tackle this defining question.

SETI or Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is an institute whose mission is to explore,     understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

Scientific methods like monitoring of electromagnetic radiation for signs of transmissions from other planets are extensively used in this quest for search of life on other planets.

SETI runs on three assumptions: That there must be intelligent life out there, that they must leak radio signals and that intelligent life would try to connect with us by sending radio signals.

Get an overview of the SETI project here: http://seti.berkeley.edu/

SETI@Home Project: The crux

Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico

SETI @ Home is an internet based public volunteer computing project. It aims to use idle computer power to help in the analysis of radio signals thus aiding the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life. It is the third such computing project and has 5.2 million participants worldwide.

The project has two main aims:

1)      To use scientific and observational methods to search for extra-terrestrial life.

2)      To prove the viability of the public volunteer computing project.

SETI@Home searches for radio signals from outer space using the Arecibo radio telescope. The data is taken passively, while the telescope is used for other scientific purposes. It is then analyzed for patterns which can be distinguished from ‘noise’, to detect possible radio sources. The data is broken down into chunks and sent to the volunteer computers to be analyzed using idle computer power, and is sent back to the main base. This is the crux of the SETI @ home project.

Ron Hipschum a physicist at San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum explains SETI’s mission briefly. “The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that there are already thousands of computers that might be available for use. Most of these computers sit around most of the time with toasters flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is where SETI@home (and you!) come into the picture. The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren’t using it and to help us “…search out new life and new civilizations.” We’ll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues its analysis when you are finished with your work. ”

You can help SETI in analyzing the mountains of data they collect. You can contribute to the Search for Extraterrestrial Life by just allowing the software to use up your computers idle time. Simply exciting ain’t it?

To know more about the SETI@Home project, follow this link: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

SETI@Home demystified at Storming Aurora 2012!

Come 18^th November, 2012 and BITS Pilani K.K. Birla Goa Campus will be privileged to host a guest lecture by the co-founder and chief scientist of the SETI@Home project, Dr. Dan Werthimer. You cannot afford to miss this one can you?

Dr. Dan Werthimer also directs other UC Berkeley SETI searches at radio, infrared and visible wavelengths, including the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations (SERENDIP). He is the principal investigator for the worldwide Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER).

Food For Thought

In 1961, Frank Drake, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz derived the now famous Drake Equation; used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

In mathematical terms it qualitatively ideates N, the number of civilizations with which communication might be possible. Rough estimates have predicted the value of N could go up to 182 million!

The Drake Equation is a simple, effective tool for stimulating intellectual curiosity about the universe around us, for helping us to understand that life as we know it is the end product of a natural, cosmic evolution, and for making us realize how much we are a part of that universe.

If all this set your adrenaline rushing, you might want to further look up the Fermi Paradox, Rare Earth Hypothesis the Zoo Hypothesis and the likes; delving deeper into the search for extraterrestrial life.

References:

• http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_about.php
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home

Written by:

Samyukta Ramnath

So the other day, I was chatting up with this neighbor of mine, and it was not long before I discovered him to be an atheist: that’s right, they are for real. And he’s got his facts right: he has arguments for whatever anybody has to throw at him. He in fact dug up some jokes about how creationists claim fossils to instead be evidence of a great flood and not the result of evolution. But here’s one other “fossil” creationists can’t drown. Its out there, way out there. Creationists gonna hate…

Quasars are a little lesser known phenomenon of the cosmos. So little is understood that people think every astro term ending with ‘sar’ is a type of a pulsar (you know what a pulsar is, right?). Quasars basically are extremely energetic active galactic nuclei of far flung galaxies. As almost always is in astronomy, when first observed they were presumed to be something else. They were mistaken to be stars, but with a peculiarly high red shift in their spectral study. Also the first Quasar to be discovered gave significant radiations in the radio wave range. When further facts suggested that they might not be the size of a star, they were christened Quasi-Stellar Radio sources, and thus the abbreviation quasar. Ironically today, most quasars to our knowledge are radio quiet.

Coming back to spectral facts, when studied, scientists observed large red shifts, which meant that they were receding away from us. And pretty quickly at that. One of the first quasars to be found, 3C 48 had a shift large enough to suggest it was receding away at 37% the speed of light. 111000km/s. Period. Further, Hubble’s law implies that the farther an object from you, the faster it is moving away from us. What does this tell you about 3C 48? Now the real relevance of quasars comes to the fore. When scientists did the calculations, they figured out that quasars are possibly the most distant species of the cosmos.

Two questions arose. Firstly, exactly how long did it take for quasar light to reach Earth, and secondly, how come the light from something so distant reach us at all in the first place.

Answer one: if the latest findings are to be trusted, then the farthest quasar found is 12.9 billion light years away. That means, light started from this quasar when the earth, the sun, and perhaps, even the Milky Way galaxy mustn’t have been formed. Light must’ve left the quasar just about 770 million years after the big bang. In other words when observing this quasar, scientists are watching an object that is 12.9 billion years old. You might as well say that, they are looking at –attention creationists- an astronomical fossil. This is why a quasar is of relevance to us. Most quasars ARE this old, and ARE far, and ARE very fast. Quasars are a reason why we better understand the time near big bang theory: after all, what better a specimen than a live object barely 770 million years post the big bang?

Answer two: this is really an analysis of what we find in a quasar. If light from that far has reached us, then it tells us a thing or two about the source. It tells us that it is so strong that the light it let out as electromagnetic energy didn’t decay in its path till it reached earth. Scientists claim that this can only be the work of a supermassive black hole, the most powerful entity in the cosmos. Sorry again, creationists. It is deduced that during that time there was much more matter for black holes to feast on than there is now. The more matter that was attracted to the hole, the greater the discs forming around it, and the greater the amount of mass being ejected as well, in the form of jets. All of this happening at unimaginable energy levels (possibly electric potential differences greater than 50 Tera volts) let out a humungous amount of energy as light across the spectrum: radiations ranging right from radio waves to cosmic and gamma waves. Estimates claim that a quasar could be brighter than several galaxies put together. Nutshell: light reaching us from that far implies a lot of energy; a lot of energy implies a lot of mass density in that era. Data ranging from temperatures and densities to the pressures and special conditions of the post big-bang era further proves and intensifies the theory of the big bang.

So you see, these two things are pretty much the most major finds about quasars. Unfortunately, these are the only two major finds of quasars. Nonetheless, patience young Jedi, there are more answers to be questioned than questions to be answered. Who knows what comes up tomorrow? As of for now, “cosmological paleontology” doesn’t sound bad, does it? Oh and as for the creationists, how long are they expecting to last in this debate? Food for thought, dear reader.

Written by:

Srihari Menon

An artist’s impression shows how a jet from a supermassive black holes (bright object at top left) could form galaxies, thereby explaining why the mass of black holes is larger in galaxies that contain more stars. (Courtesy: ESO)

We recently had our first impromptu observation session of this semester

Here’s more about it -

http://animeshsri.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/celestias-1st-observaion-session-2012-13/#

31^st August, 2012 was the night of the blue moon — which isn’t blue, of course, unless you happen to be near a volcano.

It was actually a mistake by an amateur astronomer in Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 that led to our current definition of “blue moon” as the unusual second full moon in a month.

Well people who think that in the blue moon skies would turn blue at night and everything would become dangerous with werewolf’s everywhere, it isn’t like that. Well it happens once in a blue moon, that’s what the saying goes when people try to justify the rarity of an occurrence.

There are normally three full moons in each of the four seasons, for a total of 12 per year. It’s impossible to say where the word blue comes from. To seek its origin one has to go to scratch history books finding the answer. In the early 1930s, the Maine Farmers’ Almanac (unrelated to the Old Farmer’s) named the third full moon in a season that had an extra fourth full moon a blue moon.

Then, in the March 1946 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, American amateur astronomer James Hugh Pruett wrote an article titled “Once in a Blue Moon.”

So basically the word blue moon is a misnomer or misinterpretation by one person which got mystified in folklore and culture and is one of the favourite bedtime stories.

The so called “blue moon” phenomenon has had a very deep impact in the Viking and Goth culture as seen in some comics and novels. The Vikings used to believe on this night the blue moon grants them the nectar of trinity and success and so a mystic wind would blow with high tide which granted there ship extra power and their enemies would be bashed that day (poor people if they knew like us that high tide caused by gravitational attraction of moon and I can go on and on). Well a similar sort of story goes with the Goths. They thought that on this day beautiful damsels from heavens would visit them and they would have the fun of there of lifetime.

Now a lot of folklore, so let’s jump to what actually happens and try to define what exactly it is by some definition.

I personally like the modern definition. It still catches the gist of the old almanac sense in a way that’s easy to remember. The next blue moon for North America will be in July 2015. Even better, there will be two blue moons in 2018 — one in January and one in March, with no full moon at all in February. The last time that happened was in 1999.

Volcanic ash and forest fires can turn the moon blue. The secret? It’s the ash. If all the ash particles are about 1 micron in size (the period at the end of this sentence is 600 microns across), they efficiently scatter away all the warm colours in moonlight, leaving a pale blue orb.

So all physics people getting the point. Huh the Vikings were so damn wrong. Their enemies could so easily use this trick to lure them in attacking and get badly bashed away.

Now let’s share some of my personal experiences of this phenomenon.

Well i am an amateur in that field don’t have any such experiences, but much of the planet saw blue moons for months after the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatau in 1883. Ditto for Mount St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. If you live in western U.S. where forest fires have been rife this summer, perhaps you’ve seen one too many blue moons.

Most of us will never get to see a real blue moon, but the calendar version will shine in Pisces tonight. We normally get one full moon a month, but every 2½ years there’s room for another to squeeze in.

Now let’s see why this phenomenon happens once in a blue moon.

So let’s get into the technicalities of this so called”blue moon”. Well the time between two full moons is 29.5 days. Now most months are of 30 or 31 days. Now as this month the 1^st moon was on the 1^st of august it has got enough time for two full moons. If the full moons were on 1^st of every month then there would be 11 blue moons a year, but that doesn’t happen due to our own restrictions of the calendar system.

Full moons have acquired a variety of names handed down from past generations. We get our moon names from the various American Indian tribes as well as the early colonists. Two common monikers for the August full moon are the sturgeon and red moons. The first refers to August being a great time to catch sturgeon and the second to the colour of the moon when it rises during the hazy summer months. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the first full moon of August was the sturgeon and the second, the red moon. It’s a fun coincidence that this month’s red moon is also blue.

As far I am concerned I am looking forward to a fine moonlit walk tonight, and I wish you the same.

By Souryendu Das