James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope (also called JWST or Webb) will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in 2021. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of […]
Gravitational lensing
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope researchers plan to investigate how new stars are born. For this, a natural phenomenon called “Gravitational lensing” is to be used. The gravitational field of a massive object will extend far into space, and cause light rays passing close to that object to be bent and refocused somewhere else. […]
NASA’s Kepler Space telescope
While this is the first Earth-sized planet discovered by TESS, other Earth-sized exoplanets have been discovered in the past, mainly by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a since-retired telescope that monitored more than 530,000 stars. In the end, the Kepler mission detected 2,662 planets, many of which were Earth-sized, and a handful of those were deemed to […]
Universe’s First Molecule
Scientists have detected the most ancient type of molecule in our universe in space for the first time ever. Helium hydride ion (HeH+) was the first molecule that formed when, almost 14 billion years ago, the falling temperatures allowed recombination of the light elements (hydrogen, helium, deuterium and traces of lithium) produced in the Big Bang. It is the first type of molecule […]
What are Gravitational Waves?
These waves are ‘ripples’ in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. The strongest gravitational waves are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, the collapse of stellar cores (supernovae), coalescing neutron stars or white dwarf stars, the slightly wobbly rotation of neutron stars that are […]
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)
What is LIGO? It is the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory and a wonder of precision engineering. It comprises of two enormous laser interferometers located thousands of kilometres apart, each having two arms which are 4 km long. It exploits the physical properties of light and of space itself to detect and understand the origins […]
Spitzer Space Telescope
The Spitzer Space Telescope is the final mission in NASA’s Great Observatories Program – a family of four space-based observatories, each observing the Universe in a different kind of light. The other missions in the program include the visible-light Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO). The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in the year 2003. It is a space-borne, […]
Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
It consists of a supercomputer that will process the enormous amounts of data produced by the SKA’s telescopes. The total compute power will be around 250 PFlops — that’s 25 per cent faster than IBM’s Summit, the current fastest supercomputer in the world. Significance: When complete, the SKA will enable astronomers to monitor the sky […]
Why do we need telescopes?
To watch the object of faraway we need to have a bigger eye over which we can collect more light coming from an object. With more light we can create a brighter image, we can then magnify the image so that it takes up more space on our retina. That’s where the telescopes come, telescope […]
Saraswati supercluster
A team of Indian astronomers have identified previously unknown, extremely large supercluster of galaxies called Saraswati Saraswati supercluster is one of the largest known structures in the nearby universe. It is 4 billion light years away from Earth and may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns. It has 43 galaxies that […]