Road To Cosmos

Vector Differentiation What is Differentiation? Simply put, Differentiation is the rate of change of a function with respect to a variable. For example, velocity tells us how fast and in which direction an object is moving, which is the rate of change of the object in space with respect to time. Mathematically, $$v=\frac{dx}{dt}$$where x is the space coordinate in 1D and t is time. In a way, mathematicians like to define is, the slope of the line tangent to the graph of \(f(x)\) Fig1: The blue line shows the function f(x) and the red line is the first derivative of the function To understand how to calculate a derivative of a function I'll give you a very basic formula widely known as the First principle $$f '(x)=\lim_{\Delta x\to0}\frac{f(x+\Delta x)-f(x)}{\Delta x}$$where \(f '(x)\) is the first derivate, \(f(x)\) is the function and \(\Delta x\) is the change we are calculating the function over. You might encounter a few notations while dealing with derivatives of a fun...

 Beginning of a New series Welcome back to my blog. Over the months I have posted many blogs on different things in space be it the infamous space race between the US and USSR, the difference between an asteroid or meteor, or be it what are stars and what they are made of etc. But I think it is time for us to dive a bit deeper and understand how it all came through together. Why do we study physics? Why ask questions about the observable universe, and in extension why ask these questions at all? I will take you from the start of physics which is through mathematics to the world of vector calculus, from then on we will discuss Classical mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism extending to Electromagnetic Theory, Thermodynamics, Solid State Physics, Quantum mechanics and a bit of Astrophysics. (Not necessarily in that order) So hold tight for we will first start with arguably the most important and boring part of the series(for some do not like the math). Let us begin with Vector Calcul...

  Asteroid V Meteoroid credit:  https://science.nasa.gov/gallery/asteroid-comets-and-meteors/ What is the difference? Asteroids: "Rocks" floating in space is the best description one can provide to define either of these objects. A layman's way of knowing which is which is based on the size of the rocks. credit:  https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch If the chunk of rock is significantly larger or in the range of 500-1000 kilometers in diameter it is given the tag of an Asteroid. We have one such belt of asteroids in our Solar system between Mars and Jupiter called as Asteroid Belt (No Joke!). While these may seem extremely big boulders floating in space compared to the massive size of the planets, they seem quite small. But these are not just rocks wandering in the dark space, these are composed of minerals and silicates and based on the amount of the chemicals present in them they are classified as C, S and M type of Asteroid. According to the International Astronomi...

 What is CME? CME or Coronal Mass Ejection, can be understood as the Sun's way of getting rid of plasma and coronal matter in no less than billions of tons in mass along with a strong magnetic field from the Sun's Corona. Have you looked at the images from the space telescopes, those loops around the Sun? They reach a peak and when it gets too much the Sun lets them go with huge amounts of matter getting released. That is defined as a CME. What about Solar winds? These can be understood as a constant breeze but made up of energized particles mostly protons and electrons. They are given into space from the Sun's upper atmosphere and are different from CME. These winds are responsible for the Geomagnetic Storms, which in turn are responsible for the non-working of power grids and satellites. credit:  https://www.space.com/22215-solar-wind.html What are Solar Flares? The release of intense electromagnetic radiation across a broad spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays, this is w...

Have you ever seen a hot iron rod? Or a Blacksmith hammering a piece of hot metal? You must have noticed then that those iron pieces glow or emit light. It was very well established in {some date} that Light is an electromagnetic wave i.e. made up of electric and magnetic field. While we had an idea of what light is made of, physicists did not know why hot objects emitted it back then.  How do hot objects emit light? When we heat a piece of iron, it first glows red, then orangish-red, to yellow ultimately leading to white. The brightness or intensity as it seemed was directly proportional to the increasing temperature, for simplicity's sake.  However, what they wanted to know was how the intensity varied with the wavelength of the light. What you need to understand is that for an object to emit radiation(visible), it need not be so hot to become luminous. All objects emit radiation in the Infrared spectrum(remember the rbg scale which tells us the temperature of the object), t...

 Do you know what Exoplanets are? Exo-planet means, external planet by the literal meaning of the word. One can say a planet outside our solar system is an exoplanet and they would be correct. However, what makes these "exoplanets" so special? they're just planets like our Venus or Neptune or Saturn. they are just planets, right? nothing we already do not know about. Kinda!! Our planets are special no doubt and we have learned a lot about them, there are still many things we do not know about them regardless exoplanets become an interesting observation for astronomers because these planets are in a different solar system. It could be a binary one or something else. They have different chemical compositions as opposed to what we find in our solar system. credits:  https://twitter.com/NASAExoplanets/status/1402010819525693471  You would be amazed to know what kind of planets are actually out there, for a start TrES-2b is a very dark planet, cause it reflects >1% of the...