Space-m17-blog - SpaceForLife

By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

Interstellar was right. Falling into a black hole is not the end, professor Stephen Hawking has claimed.

Although physicists had assumed that all matter must be destroyed by the huge gravitational forces of a black hole, Hawking told delegates in Sweden that it could escape and even pop into another dimension. The theory solves the ‘information paradox’ which has puzzled scientists for decades. While quantum mechanics says that nothing can ever be destroyed, general relativity says it must be.

However under Hawking’s new theory, anything that is sucked into a black hole is effectively trapped at the event horizon - the sphere surrounding the hole from which it was thought that nothing can escape. And he claims that anything which fell in could re-emerge back into our universe, or a parallel one, through Hawking radiation - protons which manage to escape from the black hole because of quantum fluctuations.

“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, there’s a way out,” Hawking told an audience held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm In the film Interstellar, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, plunges into the black hole Gargantura. As Cooper’s ship breaks apart in the force, he evacuates and ends up in a Tesseract – a four dimensional cube. He eventually makes it out of the black hole.

(excerpt - click the link for the complete article)

An Exo-What...?

Simply put, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star. That said, just because a planet orbits a star (like Earth) does not mean that it is automatically stable for life. The planet must be within the habitable zone, which is the area around a star in which water has the potential to be liquid…aka not so close that all the water would evaporate, and not too far away where all the water would freeze.

Recently, with the help of our Kepler spacecraft, scientists have discovered the most Earth-like exoplanet ever, Kepler-452b. Pretty cool! This chart shows 12 other exoplanet discoveries that are less than twice the size of Earth, and live in the habitable zone of their host star. Kepler-452b is special because all previous findings have orbited stars that are smaller and cooler than Earth’s.

You may be thinking, “Okay, so what? There’s an Earth-like planet that spins around a similar sized sun.” Well, Kepler-452b orbits its sun at nearly the same distance from its star as Earth does from our sun, which means that conditions on the plant could be similar to those here on Earth!

We can already guess your next question…”When are we going to Kepler-452b?!” Well, this planet is located in the constellation Cygnus which is 1,400 light-years away, so not anytime soon. However, our Kepler spacecraft continues to search for Earth-like exoplanets and gather important scientific information about them.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

“You and Your Research,” Dr. Richard W. Hamming of Bell Labs (via ryanandmath)

New video! Spiral galaxies in a nutshell!

Aboard the International Space Station this morning, Astronaut Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully captured JAXA’s Kounotori 5 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5) at 6:28 a.m. EDT.

Yui commanded the station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2, to reach out and grapple the HTV-5, while NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren provided assistance and Scott Kelly monitored HTV-5 systems. The HTV-5 launched aboard an H-IIB rocket at 7:50 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 19, from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. Since then, the spacecraft has performed a series of engine burns to fine-tune its course for arrival at the station.

The HTV-5 is delivering more than 8,000 pounds of equipment, supplies and experiments in a pressurized cargo compartment. The unpressurized compartment will deliver the 1,400-pound CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) investigation, an astrophysics mission that will search for signatures of dark matter and provide the highest energy direct measurements of the cosmic ray electron spectrum.

Below is a breathtaking image shared by Astronaut Scott Kelly of the HTV-5 and Canadarm2, which reached out and grappled the cargo spacecraft.

Disclaimer: These are online resources that I have found, They are not meant to be your only source of study, instead you can use them to your enhance your normal study. I don’t know what level these resources are aimed at, but I’ve tried to provide a range for a number of different topics. I don’t study Physics, so I don’t know how accurate these are, or how they relate to course syllabi.

Space & the universe:

How do we know the Big Bang actually happened?

Visible Earth - A catalogue of satellite images of our home planet detailing everything from atmospheric data to city lights or natural disasters.

NASA - NASA homepage with links to other NASA sites. FAQ

British National Space Centre - Site containing information about current satellites launches, solar system and Earth observation. There are links from the ‘Learning Zone’ to other Space sites.

Online Physics Lecture Notes - A directory of online undergraduate level astronomy and physics lecture notes from various universities.

Physics in Perspective: 2013 lectures - Video: Dr Andreas Freise talks about finding black holes with lasers.

Galileo: An educational film - An educational film dramatising the life of Galileo and his scientific discoveries.

Why our universe might exist on a knife-edge

Is our universe the only universe?

Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

The hunt for a supermassive black hole

The story behind the Mars Rovers

The design of the universe

Shedding light on dark matter

Why did Pluto get kicked out of the planet club?

Geocentrism and heliocentrism

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation

An overview of orbital mechanics

Orbital mechanics -  These drawings simplify the physics of orbital mechanics, making it easy to grasp some of the basic concepts.

Gravity is More Than a Name

Circular and Satellite Motion Interactives

Vectors, Motion & Momentum

Vectors - Motion and Forces in Two Dimensions

Vectors, Projectiles, and 2-D Motion Interactives

One dimensional motion - velocity, speed, time, acceleration, projectiles.

Two dimensional motion - projectile velocity, inclines, centripetal force and acceleration.

Introduction to vectors and scalars - Khan Academy  (YouTube)

Physics: Introduction to Vectors (YouTube)

Momentum and Its Conservation

Momentum and Collisions Interactives

1-D Kinematics Interactives

The simple pendulum - Excellent animations proving assorted points about the simple harmonic motion approximation for pendulums.

The Physics of Body Mechanics

Momentum and forces (BBC Bitesize)

Forces and Newton’s laws

Impacts and linear momentum

Moments, torque and angular momentum

Oscillatory motion

Work & Energy:

Work, Energy, and Power

Work and Energy Interactives

Introduction to work and energy - Khan Academy

SparkNotes: SAT Physics: Work, Energy, and Power

Thermal Physics:

Thermal Physics

Thermodynamics

SparkNotes: SAT Physics: Thermal Physics

Thermal Physics - Heat and Temperature (YouTube)

Electricity & Magneticism:

Static Electricity

Static Electricity Interactives

The Electromagnetic Spectrum Song by Emerson & Wong

Electromagnetic Spectrum - Introduction

Electricity and magneticism (Khan academy)

Current Electricity

Magnetism Interactives

Direct Current Versus Alternating Current

Circuits

Circuit symbols review notes

Circuit components overview

Resistors in Circuits

Batteries in Circuits

Capacitors in Circuits

Online circuit lab

Electric Current

Electric Resistance

Electric Power

Light & Sound:

Waves

Waves and Sound Interactives

Sound Waves and Music

Mechanical waves and sound

Light Waves and Color

Light waves

Reflection and the Ray Model of Light

Refraction and Lenses Interactives

Refraction and the Ray Model of Light

Circles of light: the mathematics of rainbows - An in-depth study of the mathematics involved in the study of rainbows. For advanced students only.

The Discovery Of Radioactivity - 100 years ago, a group of scientists unknowingly ushered in the Atomic Age. Their work initiated paths of research which changed our understanding of the building blocks of matter.

Light: Particle or a Wave?

Refraction of Light

Diffraction of Light

Sources of Visible Light

Laser Fundamentals

Prisms and Beamsplitters

What is the speed of dark? Vsauce. YouTube (2014).

Primary Colors

Diffraction of Light

Atoms:

The Discovery and Research on the Atom - A description of some of the important developments in understanding the atom an its constituents. Some parts of the site are very mathematical and go beyond college level physics.

Large Hadron Collider finds elusive new particle after 50 years

Building atoms

Revise atom structure (S-cool, intro level)

Build an atom - Move the electrons, protons and neutrons yourself to create different atoms.

Definitions & Tools:

Torques - Definitions of various torques, statements of Euler’s equations.

Elasticity - Definitions for a selection of topics related to elasticity.

Forces - Glossary of terms and mathematical derivations for various forces.

Friction - A few good definitions relating to friction.

Mass and Weight - Brief definitions for various mass and weight related topics.

A Dictionary of Units of Measurement - The history and conversion of different numeric systems

Physics Forums - A busy forum covering every physics topic under the sun. Great for everything from homework questions to discussing the origins of the universe.

The Laws List - The Laws List is an alphabetised guide featuring several hundred laws, rules, principles and other related topics in physics, from aberration to the Zeeman effect.

Astro Physical Calculator - A fully working physical calculator with physical constants stored in memory.

Other:

Introduction to MRI physics - A detailed page on the workings of mri scanners with lots of animations (requires shockwave).

How Does a Cat Land on its Feet? - The saying is that cats always land on their feet. This animation explains how they do this.

X‑rays

What physics taught me about marketing

Physics Timeline

Careers:

Careers in physics

What can I do with my degree in physics?

Careers In Physics - American Physical Society

Important Dates and Discoveries - The Physics of the Universe

Saturn, Cincinnati Observatory. _Popular astronomy_ 1860.

A photo of S Rings, a ring near Saturn. Took by Cassini with COISS on March 04, 2013 at 08:56:39. Detail page on OPUS database.

The Beauty of Earth