Photons are strange – they have no stationary mass. But photons do not stand still. In fact, they rush around us with the highest possible speed – 299792.458 km/s. Although without mass, photons have kinetic energy, the energy of motion. Because of this energy they are not immune to the force of gravity.

Albert Einstein discovered that mass can be converted into energy. The most obvious example is the nuclear bomb, which in a huge explosion of a small mass releases frighteningly large amount of energy. Since mass can be converted into energy, means that energy is a certain amount of mass.

It can be considered that for photons moving at high speed the entire mass is converted into kinetic energy. The mass of the black hole pulls photon down as if it has a mass that its energy represents.

Why light can not escape from a black hole

There are other, perhaps easier way to understand why light can not escape from a black hole. Einstein’s theory explains gravity as the curvature of space that surrounds the mass. What is the amount of matter in a point higher, the space around it is more curved. Therefore, the beam of light that is trying to leave a black hole can not get out – walls of “bowls” of space that surrounds black hole are too steep to “climb with them”.

Do massive bodies attract the light?

And the body with a mass less than that of black holes have a measurable gravitational effect on the light. British scientist Arthur Eddington proved in 1919 that Einstein was right when he claimed that massive bodies attract the light and change her direction. Eddington knew that was coming a total eclipse of the sun.

During the eclipse, the moon is between the earth and the sun, obscuring it in that way. When a solar flare is dark, can see other stars during the day. Edington and colleagues traveled to Africa, where is eclipse best seen.

Do black holes bend light? They found that the sun quite a bit bend brightness of distant stars when it passes close to its perimeter. This is to prove that the area around the mass of the sun slanted and that starlight bend when passing by the Sun as drawn by his gravity. You can see here Biggest Black Hole In The Universe!

Facts about the influence of the black hole into the light

No. 1 – light cannot escape black hole

No. 2 – dark disk surrounding a black hole

No. 3 – black holes sometimes “vomit” light, still no explanation

No. 4 – it reflects no light

The post How Does A Black Hole Effect Light appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

If we, by any chance, been somewhere where there is no atmosphere, even the most distant stars would not twinkle. For example, the astronauts on the Moon, which has no atmosphere, see the sky filled with stars with unchanging shine.

But here on earth, covered with a thick coating air, starlight is on the way to the floor sways to and fro. Above and around us, the air masses are always on the move; warm air rises and cool down.

The air sways light in greater or lesser extent, depending on its density. Therefore, starlight seems blinks when passing first through less frequent, and then through the denser air.

Due to flickering, we see the stars less sharply and it seems that they are greater. The severity of their brightness are also rapidly changing: shine, and darkened, but again shine as a star that sparkles. This change in brightness is called scintillation, from the Latin meaning scintilla spark. The whole phenomenon is known as jitter. Check biggest star!

However, do not twinkling all the bodies in the universe. Planets bounce sunlight and it seems to us that they glow unchanging.

For example, Venus and Mars seem like a big bright star – who do not blink. As these planets closer to Earth, we see them as tiny circle, and not as a dotted lights. The light that comes from all parts of the disk still sways under the influence of air.

But the circle is made up of so many dot-lights, some of them dark and some of them at the same time enhances the shine to the overall average brightness level does not change.

Therefore, it seems that the glow of the planet is unchangeable. In fact, thus we differentiate between planets and stars – planets twinkling. Only when its light passes through a very rough thick air, seem to us that the planet is blinking.

The sun is a star, but since it is much closer than the stars in the night sky, we see it as a great circle of unchanging shine. If the sun was away billions of kilometers from us, it would twinkling just like all the other stars.

Did you know; biggest star is 1,708 times larger than sun!

The post Facts About Twinkling Stars appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

Mercury – closest to sun

In the sky of the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury, the Sun is huge and looks three times higher than when viewed from Earth. By day, its surface can be blindingly bright. But the sky is black and even then, because Mercury has almost no atmosphere that repelled and wasted sunlight (similar to Earth’s natural satellite, the Moon). As the sun heats the rocky landscape of Mercury, temperatures can jump up to 427 ° C. At night, however, the smooth heat radiates into space, and the temperature drops to -183 ° C.

Venus – greenhouse effect

Venus, the second planet from the sun, enveloped by the atmosphere made up mainly of gaseous carbon dioxide. In this atmosphere flying thick stinking clouds of sulfuric acid. They made every day on Venus cloudy. Although Venus is distant from the Sun than Mercury, the temperature on its surface also be higher. This is due to the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide prevents heat to leave the planet, such as a greenhouse keeps plants warm. Therefore, the temperature on Venus is around 482 ° C. You can read here lot about Venus

Mars – light at noon

After Earth, the third planet, comes Mars. On it is the apparent size of the Sun to a third less than on Earth. The amount of light that comes to it is three times smaller than the one that shines on Earth. Weakened light still has to make its way through the dusty red skies, often filled with dark red ground which raise the storm winds. However, over the year the temperature may reach a similar temperature as the Earth, 17 ° C, and at noon on Mars can be very light. Read about Dust Storm On Mars.

Rest of planets

After Mars are huge planets, composed mainly of gas – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. All four are covered with dense clouds. On each of the four outer planets of the solar system, the sun seems less and less, and its brightness weaker.

For example, on Jupiter Sun appears five times less than on Earth, and Jupiter receives twenty-five times less light and heat than Earth. From the great height, from Jupiter’s clouds, we would saw a little pale sun. Read here more facts about Jupiter.

Although the sunlight on Saturn is even more weaker, there is enough to illuminate its enormous ring system, which are composed mainly of ice. The sunlight that hit them turns them into sparkling light circles. Depending on the tilt of Saturn to the Sun, these rings can cast a huge shadow on the surface of the planet blindfolded its southern half with even deeper darkness.

And finally, when viewed from a distant icy Pluto, by 2006 the ninth planet of the solar system, fact is that the sun is away cold light, at a distance of 5.9 billion kilometers. It looks like a very bright star in a dark sky and could hardly guess that this is Pluto sun.

The post Does The Sun Shines All 8 Planets appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The mission was launched on 16 October was called Shenzhou 5, a rocket that lifted the spacecraft into orbit belonged to the type Long March 2F (Changzheng 2F). Of course, this type of missile is named after the communist long march from the 1930s under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

Chinese astronaut who flew on 16 October in the universe is called Yang Liwei. Then he held the rank of lieutenant colonel, and later became even Major General. At the time of the first flight he was 38 years old.

In orbit, Yang Liwei 14 times circled Earth, and all within 21 hours, 22 minutes and 45 seconds. He was orbiting around our planet at an altitude between 332 and 336 kilometers (called low Earth orbit).

The launch was carried out from China’s Jiuquan launch site in the Gobi Desert. People’s Republic of China has more than three space launch center in other locations – one on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, one in Sichuan Province (southwestern China) and one in Shanxi Province (northern China).

The post The First Chinese man in Space Yang Liwei appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The explosion was carried out at a distance of 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface (but the height of 100 kilometers is considered the boundary of the universe). In comparison, at the height of about 400 kilometers today is also International Space Station (ISS).

U.S. bomb detonated on the day it launched the missiles Thor and exploded about 1,400 miles west of Hawaii.

It is interesting that the explosion was so strong that it went out, and about 300 light street lights in Hawaii, and turn on the many burglar alarms.

The reason for this is the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that produce such an explosion and which are sensitive to electrical appliances.

There are theories that such a cosmic explosion using EMP could cause the cancellation of a large part of the electrical and electronic equipment on Earth. Otherwise, given the U.S. space nuclear test had a name Starfish Prime. Also caused a cancellation of many satellites orbiting the Earth.

The post Largest Nuclear Explosion in Space – 1.4 Megatons appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

Plasma is the fourth state of matter – along with solid, liquid and gas – and it’s the most abundant form of matter in the observable universe. The Sun is a massive ball of plasma, as is every star and every inch of space between planets and solar systems. On Earth, lightning is our most famous naturally occurring plasma, along with the spectacular auroras at the poles.

Given its abundance, it’s quite surprising plasma wasn’t identified until the Twenties. That’s because electrons weren’t discovered until the late-i9th century, and without an understanding of subatomic charged particles, you can’t understand how plasma works.

Plasma is formed by superheating a gas. Normally, atoms in a gas move freely, but their electrons are still bound to their nuclei. With enough energy though, electrons pull free of their nuclei, leaving behind positively charged ions. This ionised state is a highly efficient conductor and is the birthplace of plasma.

The glowing tip of a welder’s torch is really a plasma arc. The torch is attached to a tank of inert gas like argon or helium. Inside the tip of the torch is a tungsten electrode with an opposite charge as the piece of metal being welded. When a high-voltage current is passed through the tungsten electrode, it ionises atoms in the gas stream, converting that current into a white-hot jet of plasma.

The role of ionisation

In a normal state, atoms are electrically neutral, meaning there are an equal number of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons (neutrons, by definition, are neutral). Ionisation occurs when that balance is tipped by the loss or gain of electrons. If an electron absorbs enough energy, it will escape from its atomic orbit, leaving behind a positively charged ion. Sometimes these free electrons have sufficient energy to enter another atom’s orbit, which is how negatively charged ions form.

Can water ever turn into plasma?

Water is the only substance on Earth that occurs naturally as a solid, liquid and gas. With water, each state of matter is accompanied by a related phase transition. Liquid water freezes to become a solid and boils to become a vapour. But is there any phase transition that could ever turn water into a plasma? Not exactly. Whether as ice, liquid water or water vapour, water retains the same molecular structure: H2O.

For water to become a plasma, the individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms would need to be broken apart and ionised separately. And if the molecular structure is broken apart, then water is no longer water. An elemental gas like hydrogen can transition between gas and plasma and back to gas. But once water molecules are split apart and ionised, those disparate atoms will not naturally return back to a water form.

The post What Is Plasma Matter State appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The word ‘spacecraft’ usually evokes an image of a ‘warp-speed’-travelling vessel of the future, but in the broadest definition, they’re any vehicle designed for travel in space -either piloted or unmanned.

In the past few decades since we’ve learned how to escape Earth’s gravity, we’ve sent hundreds of spacecraft off to many of the major destinations in the Solar System, from our own Moon and the Sun, right out to dwarf planet Pluto and the very border of interstellar space.

While the Vostok manned space programme and Apollo missions to the Moon required life-support systems for the astronauts on board, sending unmanned craft into space is far from simple by comparison.

Depending on the mission type and the target destination, the challenges of deep space and hazards encountered can threaten the craft’s main systems or damage the sensitive science instruments it carries, potentially rendering the mission a failure.

A probe, lander, orbiter or any of the broad categories a spacecraft can fall under will house bespoke technologies specific to its mission, but they all require a power supply and energy distribution to keep their systems and instruments running. Power is a premium commodity, especially for those missions that run over decades like the Voyager and New Horizons probes. Chemical fuel cells, solar power, batteries or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) all might be used as an energy source. Via careful monitoring both from ground control on Earth and by the spacecraft’s main computer, power to any individual system can be shut down to keep the electrical outlay within the limits of the supply.

The on-board computer isn’t just there to keep tabs on power though. This will process all of the data from instruments, interpret signals from mission control and, vitally, maintain several levels of fault protection, helping to prevent all manner of problems, from minor malfunctions to those that can jeopardise the entire mission. As a fundamental component of any computer, the craft will also contain a clock by which all activity is regulated.

Around half a dozen subsystems control a spacecraft’s propulsion, attitude and articulation. A main engine produces the force necessary for a motor burn or orbit insertion, with rocket fuel or propellant. Thrusters are much smaller devices that can nudge a craft back on course or make other correctional manoeuvres. Controlling the orientation of the craft is important not just to maintain its trajectory, but also to provide the ideal position for communicating with Earth, pointing instruments in the right direction, and to use both sunlight and shadow for thermal control.

The extreme conditions of the Solar System mean any spacecraft needs to be equipped with environmental subsystems to deal with many dangers. Colliding with an asteroid is probably of least concern: even if a spacecraft is travelling through the Asteroid Belt, there are millions of kilometres between each one so the odds of a crash are negligible.

The threat of micrometeoroids – tiny particles weighing less than a gram – is very real though. They travel at thousands of kilometres an hour and a collision with one is like being hit by a high-velocity bullet. So sensitive areas of the craft are shielded with blankets of Kevlar armour and strong fabric. The lack of atmosphere in space makes the spacecraft’s systems prone to temperatures outside their range, so for thermal regulation special heaters are used as well as passive cooling with gold reflectors or white thermal blankets to deflect heat from the Sun.

Dealing with space radiation

As we send more probes farther into space and learn more about our Solar System, the prospect of sending manned missions beyond the Moon is becoming much more realistic. One of the biggest obstacles to this effort is how to protect astronauts from the high-energy particles found in deep space and the deadly solar winds, which contain alpha particles and protons that can destroy DNA, causing cancer.

Astronauts in terrestrial orbit, such as those working aboard the International Space Station, are protected by the Earth’s magnetosphere, but Apollo astronauts are thought to have got lucky in avoiding the deadly solar maximum on NASA’s missions to the Moon.

Recently, scientists have been working on a way of using magnets to create an artificial miniature magnetosphere 200 metres (660 feet) around a manned craft that would effectively separate the charge of the solar wind, deflecting harmful particles away. This still wouldn’t protect from intergalactic cosmic rays though, meaning a safe manned mission to, say, Mars is still a way off yet.

The post How Do Spacecraft Navigate In Space appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The charged particles are produced primarily by the gas giant’s magnetosphere, though they are also contributed to by the bombardment of solar winds emanating from the Sun.

These generated particles impact into the atomic and molecular hydrogen in Saturn’s polar atmosphere, causing the gaseous atoms to ionise. Ultimately this ionisation results in photons being emitted, which combined lead to that distinctive ethereal glow.

Importantly, unlike the auroras we witness here on Earth, those imaged on Saturn are not visible to the human eye. Indeed, the aurora only glows brightly like this at about four micrometres (0.0002 inches), which is six times the wavelength visible to the human eye.

The images here were captured by the Cassini space probe’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), which can peer deep into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum.

The post What Causes Saturn’s Polar Auroras appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The unprecedented theory was proposed after astronomers found it accounted for a whopping 14 per cent of NGC 1277’s total galactic mass, blowing through a previously held belief that galactic black holes averaged only 0.1 per cent of a galaxy’s total mass.

This mismatched pairing of a normal galaxy in the Perseus cluster with a black hole 17 billion times the mass of the Sun caused scientists to scour the surrounding area and calculate the gravitational interactions between local astronomical objects. During their search they found a giant galaxy – NGC 1275 – that could have supported the black hole about 325,000 light years from NGC 1277.

This spurred the astronomers to run some computer simulations to study the potential ways 1277’s black hole might have ‘jumped’ from 1275. The result was a theory in which 1275 was formed from two galaxies with 10-billion-solar-mass black holes which, during the merger, caused one of them to be ejected at phenomenal speed. This runaway black hole was then assimilated by NGC 1277.

Speaking on the supermassive black hole at the heart of 1277, one of the paper’s authors – Erin Bonning – said it is an “extraordinary black hole in an ordinary galaxy”.

Despite the team’s theory being backed up by a number of computer simulations, the complex chain of events that it rests upon have been questioned by some in the astrophysical community. Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, MA, commented:

” Several rare events (like those suggested by the team) together are unlikely. I would think that there are more likely ways of achieving the same result.”

The post Biggest Black Hole In The Universe appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.

The first of the four Orbiting Astronomical Observatory satellites, OAO-1, was launched in April 1966 but was terminated after a power failure rendered its instruments useless. The second, OAO-2, was launched in December 1968 and successfully deployed its 11 ultraviolet telescopes to become the first device to observe space from orbit. The next model, Space OAO-B, also failed, but the final OAO-3 space telescope – which was dubbed Copernicus – was the most successful in this series and included an X-ray detector, paving the way for more powerful space telescopes capable of observation in many different wavelengths.

In the wake of the hit-and-miss Orbiting Astronomical Observatories, a flurry of space telescopes has been sent up to circle our planet and, more recently, the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. We’ve even managed to put one – the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) – into solar orbit.

Some of these, like the world-famous Hubble, have been invaluable in our pursuit of astronomical knowledge. But sending anything into space is expensive: Hubble alone cost GBP 1.6 billion (USD 2.5 billion) to construct and, including the five shuttle missions required for maintenance and repair, a further GBP 4.8 billion (USD 7.5 billion) to keep it operational. Compare that to the GBP 830 million (USD 1.3 billion) it cost to build the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (or ALMA) – the planet’s most expensive terrestrial telescope -and you may be left wondering why we bother with the off-Earth variety. There’s a very good reason though.

In the case of Spitzer, it can take far more detailed images of celestial objects from the proximity of its solar orbit. However one of the main reasons why we send telescopes into space is to get out of Earth’s atmosphere, which selectively scatters visible light and blocks many different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, restricting our view of space. By blocking some of the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, X-rays and other high-energy radiation that is harmful and even deadly to most organisms, our atmosphere has enabled life to flourish on Earth. But those frequencies carry a mine of information about the cosmos and can provide images that simply can’t be captured from a terrestrial vantage point.

Since the Sixties space telescopes have become increasingly sophisticated. Among the dozens that we’ve sent into orbit – including Fermi, Planck and the three remaining space telescopes of the Great Observatories programme – the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST; named after a NASA administrator) will allow us to see farther than ever and hopefully learn even more about our universe.

Great Observatories under the microscope

Over 13 years from 1990 to 2003, NASA launched a series of four orbital telescopes that have collectively come to be known as the Great Observatories. Their origins lie back in the late-Seventies and early-Eighties when it was decided that the planned Hubble Space Telescope programme would benefit from three other telescopes, each covering different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum. Shortly after the launch of Hubble in 1990 with its eye on the visible and near-ultraviolet wavelengths, was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991). The Chandra X-ray Observatory launched third and the Spitzer Space Telescope was the final one in 2003, detecting the long wavelengths of the infrared spectrum. Only Hubble and Chandra are still in a terrestrial orbit, with Spitzer trailing the Earth in a solar orbit and Compton having been deorbited in 2000 after a gyroscope failed.

The post How Does Space Telescope Work appeared first on Some Interesting Facts.