Last week, while looking at some of the best images from the Cassini spacecraft, I commented on the fact that the smooth rings of Saturn are small, varied chunks of ice and rock when you get down to the smaller scales. Reflecting on that this morning, I was thinking about how observing objects in our universe at smaller scales gives new insight into the variety and complexity of natural phenomena. Not long after, I came across a story of a new interesting object in our own Solar System. A new binary asteroid was discovered. This in itself isn’t too different...
One of the big questions in astrophysics is about variation of the laws of Physics. The laws we know and are familiar with; angular momentum, gravity, energy, are the same everywhere on Earth. But what about beyond Earth? The universe is so large and so vast, we may be in a local region where the laws of Physics are set, and our laws may be different from a distinct region somewhere else in the universe. The good news is that we can make predictions based on our understanding of physics. And with our powerful telescopes that allow us to view a variety of...
The thing about black holes is that they are very dense. If we took the entire 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg of the Sun (This is the real mass of the Sun) and turned it into a black hole, it would be about 6 Km in diameter. It is theorized that there are around 100 Million Black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. But if they aren’t near a large reservoir of gas and dust, with their small size they are pretty harmless and invisible. The only way we could find them would be through their gravitational influence, which is hard to...
