गामा किरण विस्फोट के निशाने पर थी धरती

विभिन्न उपग्रहों और दुनिया भर की वेधशालाओं से प्राप्त आंकड़ों से संकेत मिला है किहमारी धरती इस वर्ष 19 मार्च 2009 को शक्तिशाली तारकीय विस्फोट के निशाने परथी। इस खगोलीय घटना को 'गामा किरण विस्फोट' के नाम से जाना जाता है। 'जीआरबी 080319बी' नामक नासा के स्विफ्ट उपग्रह ने इस विस्फोट का पता लगायाथा। इस उपग्रह के आंकड़ों से इस खगोलीय घटना की वास्तविक स्थिति की जानकारीभी मिली थी। समाचार एजेंसी 'शिन्हुआ' के मुताबिक इस घटना के अवलोकन सेखगोलविदें को गामा किरणों के फटने की जितने विस्तृत चित्र मिले उतने पहले कभी नहीं मिल पाए थे। जिस क्षणस्विफ्ट उपग्रह गामा किरण विस्फोट का चित्र भेज रहा था उसी क्षण नासा के पवन उपग्रह पर स्थित रूस केकोनस' यंत्र ने गामा किरणों के व्यापक ढांचे का विस्तृत ब्यौरा उपलब्ध कराया। ''पाई आफ द स्काई' नामकरोबोटिक ऑप्टिकल कैमरे ने गामा किरणों में विस्फोट का पहला दृश्य प्रकाश का चित्र लिया। इसके 15 सेकेंड बादविस्फोट की चमक इतनी बढ़ गई कि उसे काले आसमान में साफ देखा जा सकता था।

Big Bang: Glossary of particle physics terms

CERN : The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, a major laboratory located near Geneva on the Swiss-French border. PARTICLE : An object which is sub-atomic, smaller than an atom, and has a definite mass and charge. HADRON: A particle with mass, made up of smaller units called quarks that are bound together. Protons and electrons are types of hadron. LHC : CERN's Large Hadron Collider that has been under development for 20 years, with a total project cost of 10 billion Swiss francs ($9 billion). PARTICLE ACCELERATOR : A machine used to accelerate streams of particles in a defined direction at high speeds. The LHC is the world's largest. COLLIDER : An accelerator in which two beams travelling in opposite directions are steered together to induce high-energy collisions between particles in one beam and those in the other. HIGGS BOSON : A theoretical particle which is thought to give matter its mass, known as the "God particle." First proposed by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh in 1964, the LHC should confirm whether it exists. STANDARD PRINCIPLE : The standard theory of modern physics is based on two other theories -- general relativity and quantum mechanics. Its main weakness is that it cannot yet fully describe gravity or mass.

World's first synthetic 'tree'

Scientists in the United States have created the world's first synthetic 'tree', a development that may lead to technologies for heat transfer and soil remediation. The "tree", developed in a lab at Cornell, simulates the process of transpiration, the cohesive capillary action that allows trees to wick moisture upward to their highest branches. The work, reported in the September 11 issue of the journal Nature, bolsters the long-standing theory that transpiration in trees and plants is a purely physical process, requiring no biological energy. It may also lead to new passive heat transfer technologies for cars or buildings, better methods for remediating soil and more effective ways to draw water out of partially dry ground. The capillary action used in trees might be applicable to developing new passive heat-transfer methods. In a building, put these passive elements that carry heat around very effectively, for example, from a solar ollector on the roof, to deliver heat all the way down through the building, then recycle that fluid back up to the roof the same way trees do it -- pulling it back up. The synthetic tree helping to build better soil remediation systems. Instead of having to soak contaminated soil to pump contaminants out, transpiration could help pull the contaminated fluid out of the soil without the use of more liquid. Similarly, the technology could also be used to draw water out of relatively dry soil without having to dig a well down to the water table, the report said.

दुनिया का सबसे बड़ा प्रयोग

CERN is the leading high energy physics laboratory in the world, their incredibly powerful particle accelerators are an important piece of their resume. Theoretically, they can create black holes.

Nearly half of the world’s particle physicists work on experiments conducted at the CERN facilities, which are located on the border between France and Switzerland. The acronym comes from Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). It was established in 1954, and now has 20 member states.

The World Wide Web was started as a project called ENQUIRE at CERN in 1989. They announced it would be free to everyone on April 30th, 1993.

CERN has built the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator and a hadron collider that is 26.659 kilometers in circumference and will be located 50 to 175 meters undergroundHiggs Boson, strangelets, magnetic monopoles, supersymmetric particles and Micro Black Holes. [pictures below]. This is the one that is theorized to produce many novel particles including:

Particle accelerators and “atom smashers” are one and the same. Just like the name says, they are used to create collisions between [altered] atoms - they do this by utilizing electric fields to propel electrically charged particles at high speeds.

The LHC is just one piece of the puzzle. The picture below is of the LHC experiments and the pre-accelerators. Each piece of equipment has to do with particular experiments.

The goal of these experiments as well as particle physics in general, is to find the fundamental building blocks of this universe. A fundamental particle would be something that has no substructure - it is made up of no other particles. A micro black hole is sometimes categorized under “particle.”

Once we grasp that mass and energy are equivalent, it makes sense to destroy matter in order to release energy. Hence splitting of the atom to make energy. When you pair that information with 1) our belief that black holes are dense points in space and

2) our ability to use particle accelerators –>

we have some very interesting results to look forward to.

The “Planck Mass” is believed to be the unit of mass when both general relativity and quantum mechanics simultaneously become important. The Planck mass is very very small.

General relativity is best explained using the analogy of fabric, hence the fabric of spacetime. Take a blanket and stretch all four corners and place a ball in the middle. The fabric “bends.” It is that bend in the fabric that acts like gravity. Think of a marble circling the drain, only if the marble took eons to fall down the drain (eventually the moon will crash into the Earth).

Quantum mechanics is the study of the relationship between “indivisible units of energy” and mass. Think of fundamental particles, but in the sense of fundamental energy. It would be cool to know if the fundamental building blocks of this universe was energy - which is what string theory states.

The LHC might allow scientists to create a collision that reaches some incredible activation energy at the level of the Planck mass. Basically, there would be a lot of energy in a very small amount of mass. If that happens, we are going to get a whole lot of stuff that we probably couldn’t have predicted.

Start at the conservation of mass - at first glance a black hole don’t make sense. How can something go into a black hole and disappear [in all of its forms] from this universe? Where does it go? How is it not “here” anymore? Etc.

Stephen Hawking put forth a theory in which he predicts that a black hole will emit exact black body radiation, and has since been called Hawking Radiation.

A black body is an object that absorbs all light that falls on it. But, gives off radiation depending on its surrounding temperatures.

Stephen Hawking predicts that a black hole gives off thermal radiation inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. The bigger the black hole, the less radiation it gives off.

It doesn’t make sense to me, but that is because he made “reliable” calculations far from a black hole in the framework of quantum field theory in curved space time.

If a black hole is losing more matter than it is taking in, it would make sense that the black hole will cease to exist. There is a tipping-point. If the mass of a black hole is less than X, we would expect it to eventually evaporate. If the mass of a black hole equals X, we would expect it to stay the same. If the mass of a black hole is greater than X, we would expect that the black hole continue to grow.

Lets go back to the fabric of spacetime. Lets call that ball in the middle of our sheet the sun. If the sun is 780 mm in circumference and 650 grams in weight [regulation basketball], a black hole could be smaller than a speck of sand and weigh more than our actual sun. The tricky part is that black holes can vary in size and mass, but they are probably governed by some function of energy.

It makes sense to conceptualize a black hole as a very massive singular point in space - massive means magnitudes of mass greater than our sun. That is why some might refer to a black hole as a single [super massive] particle.

So how big will the black hole that CERN makes be?

We can predict its mass based on the atoms, ions, etc. we are using to smash together, we also can estimate how much energy will be in that particle. IF they make one, it will most definitely be a micro black hole, and it will be much smaller than X.

It will quickly evaporate… hopefully.

What do we have to gain from all of this?

An outlandish guess is space travel at or near the speed of light.

A better understanding of Our Universe, is almost a given.

Courtesy:http://samescaredworld.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/man-made-black-holes/

Rainbow

Internal Reflectance and Refraction
The traditional description of the rainbow is that it is made up of seven colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Actually, the rainbow is a whole continuum of colors from red to violet and even beyond the colors that the eye can see.
The colors of the rainbow arise from two basic facts:

Sunlight is made up of the whole range of colors that the eye can detect. The range of sunlight colors, when combined, looks white to the eye. This property of sunlight was first demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666.

Light of different colors is refracted by different amounts when it passes from one medium (air, for example) into another (water or glass, for example).

When the light paths through a raindrop are traced for red and blue light, one finds that the angle of deviation is different for the two colors because blue light is bent or refracted more than that of red light. When we see a rainbow and its band of colors we are looking at light refracted and reflected from different raindrops, some viewed at an angle of 42 degrees; some, at an angle of 40 degrees, and some in between. This is illustrated in the Figure, adapted from Johnson's Physical Meteorology. This rainbow of two colors would have a width of almost 2 degrees (about four times larger than the angular size as the full moon).

It is interesting to note that even though blue light is refracted more than red light in a single drop, we see the blue light on the inner part of the arc because we are looking along a different line of sight that has a smaller angle (40 degrees) for the blue.