Ramanisblog

Tag: Space & Time

  • Mind Brain Science Where They Meet, Online Event

    It is quite rare to find online Discussions on important issues confronting Science. Many Concepts of Science need discussion.Science is often understood to be the domain of specialists and is difficult for a common man to understand. Because of this erroneous perception,many psudeo specialists gain popularity and they misinform public.

    My experience has been that most scientists communicate very fluently and explain seemingly difficult concepts in very simple terms.

    I have been writing this blog concentrating on Hinduism,it’s presence throughout the world, advanced Scientific Concepts in ancient in Indian texts.

    Readers may find Philosophy, Advanced theories in Astronomy, Quantum, The problem of Perception in my site.

    I have also devoted a lot of time to publish articles on Space ,Time,Parallel Universes, Universal Consciousness and How every thing in the Universe in connected.

    Mind.. What is it?Is it simply the Brain? What is Intellect?What is consciousness?What is awareness? Are we aware because we are conscious?Or is it the other way around?

    What is Space and how is it related to Mind?

    These are very vital questions in Science.

    These points are addressed to in the programme as detailed below.

    Please go through the note and enjoy an Intellectual feast.

    Programmes of this nature are conducted by Prime Point Foundation which was founded Inspired by Dr.Abdul Kalam ,Past President of India.Under the guidance and active participation of Sri. Srinivasan,this organisation is spreading True Knowledge by inviting eminent people from each field to disseminate Wisdom and True science.

    One of the Speakers is my close friend Dr.A.V.Srinivasan,world renowned Neurophysician and an authority in his chosen field.He was also the President of Indian Neurology Congress.

    A very well read Scientist and Doctor with a human touch who has been helping the downtrodden by providing Free consultation, Medicines and Food once a week for the past twelve years(is it more?),Dr. AVS is a rare human being in Humility and thirst for Knowledge.

    Another speaker is Dr.Sivathanu Pillai,Scientist and Father of Brahmos Missile.

    The topic.

    Mind Brain and Science- Where do they meet?

    For the information of my readers ,I will be one of the invitees to take part in the event as a listener and will be interacting with them through my questions.

    Sangamam: Fusion of Great Minds” – A new initiative from Prime Point Foundation

    Prime Point Foundation with the support of eMagazine PreSense and Digital Journalists Association of India (DiJAI) is starting a new initiative of Intellectual Discussion titled “Sangamam : Fusion of Great Minds” to be hosted every last Sunday of the month at 6 pm through Zoom, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook .

    Two nationally renowned intellectuals will be invited to discuss a topic of relevance.

    Although the discussions will be streamed live through YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, only selected interested intellectual persons will be invited to login to Zoom for direct interaction with the experts and raise questions.

    The first episode of this new initiative will be held on Sunday, 30th August 2020 from 6 pm to 7.15 pm IST.

    Padma Bhushan Dr A Sivathanu Pillai (Eminent Scientist of DRDO and ISRO and Father of BrahMos Missile) and Dr A V Srinivasan (Internationally renowned Neurologist) will discuss and deliberate on the topic, “Mind, Brain and Science : Where do they Meet?”.

    Both have 50 years of experience in their respective domains and are well-known for their excellence and achievement.

    After the discussion, there will be a Question and Answer Session for 15 to 20 minutes, from the audience who login to Zoom.
    before 28th Aug 2020.

    This is an exclusive Premium Programme.

    This programme can be watched live through the links.

    https://youtu.be/JqUHjooHQiE

    https://twitter.com/prpoint

    https://www.facebook.com/prpoint

    Prime Point Srinivasan
    Founder-Chairman,
    Prime Point Foundation.
    http://www.primepointfoundation.in

    Contact me prpoint@gmail.com

  • Astronomers Reveal First Objects In Our Universe-Video.

    June 1, 2007 — Astronomers removed light from closer and better known galaxies and stars from pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The remaining images are believed to be the first objects in space, 13 billion light years away.

    The first stars in our universe are long gone, but their light still shines, giving us a peek at what the universe looked like in its early years.
    Astrophysicists believe they’ve spotted a faint glow from stars born at the beginning of time. Harvey Moseley, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says, “The reason they’re faint is just because they’re very, very far away, they’re over at the far edge of the universe.”
    After the big bang, the universe stayed dark for about 200 million years. Now, new pictures reveal the first light from objects 13 billion light years away, the infants of our universe. “So, we’re seeing what sometimes people call the first light in the universe, which formed after the big bang,” Dr. Moseley explains.
    Using pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists first removed light from closer stars and galaxies. The light areas left in the background are believed to be the first objects in space. Alexander Kashlinsky, Ph.D., astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, says, “The early universe was a very hot place in this sense, like it was filled with objects that have been emitting light much more furiously than today.”
    Researchers say the objects are either stars, hundreds of times more massive than our own sun, or enormous black holes. Either way, the pictures bring us one step closer to learning how the universe was born. NASA’s planned James Webb Space Telescope will be able to identify the nature of the newfound clusters and determine if they are stars or black holes.
    BACKGROUND: Using a telescope as a time machine, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are closer to identifying the first objects of the universe. The latest observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that infrared light detected in a prior study comes from clusters of bright objects that lived within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
    THE DARK AGE: According to current science, space, time and matter originated 13.7 billion years ago in a tremendous explosion called the Big Bang. A few hundred million years later, the first stars formed, ending the “dark age” of the universe. Astronomers believe the objects observed by the Spitzer telescope are either the first stars — hundreds of times more massive than our sun — or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If they turn out to be stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. Our own Milky Way was probably created when mini-galaxies like these merged.
    IN THE INFRARED: The Spitzer scientists were looking specifically at the cosmic infrared background of the universe, a diffuse light from the early epoch when structure first emerged in the cosmos. A prior study reported in 2005 detected infrared light, suggesting that it originated from clumps of the very first objects in the universe. This second analysis indicates that this patchy light is scattered across the entire sky and comes from clusters of bright, monstrous objects more than 13 billion light-years away. Although that light began its journey as ultraviolet or visible light, by the time it reached earth, its wavelengths had been stretched into the infrared by the growing space-time that causes the universe’s expansion. Based on the strength of the infrared light signal, they concluded that the total amount of energy produced by the objects was so large, only very large stars or black holes consuming a lot of matter would be capable of emitting it. Other parts of the cosmic infrared background are from distant starlight absorbed by dust and re-emitted as infrared light.
    SEEING IS BELIEVING: When we peer into space with a telescope, we are actually looking back in time. Telescopes detect emitted light, and the light that reaches us from the closest galaxy, Andromeda, for instance, has taken two million years to reach us. The Spitzer telescope looked at the first brilliant objects to exist in our universe. The Spitzer telescope scanned five areas of the sky for about 25 hours per region, collecting light even from the faintest of objects. Then astronomers meticulously subtracted light from things that were in the way, such as foreground galaxies and dust in our solar system, or in interstellar clouds. When all that was left was the most ancient light, the scientists studied fluctuations in the intensity of the infrared brightness, revealing a clustering of objects to produce the observed light pattern.
    The American Astronomical Society contributed to the information contained in the video portion of this report.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0607-first_stars_in_the_universe.htm

  • Hubble Reaches ‘Undiscovered Country’ of Most Distant Primeval Galaxies

    Mind boggling in terms of size and the Time Factor.Please see the Image, by following the link, enlarge the picture and read my blog TIME-A Nonlinear Theory.Would be interesting.
    ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2010) — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before.

    The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe. This makes Hubble a powerful “time machine” that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
    The data from Hubble’s new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), on the Ultra Deep Field (taken in August 2009) have been analyzed by no less than five international teams of astronomers. A total of 15 papers have been submitted to date by astronomers worldwide. Some of these early results are being presented by various team members on Jan. 6, 2010, at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
    “With the rejuvenated Hubble and its new instruments, we are now entering unchartered territory that is ripe for new discoveries,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, leader of the survey team that was awarded the time to take the new WFC3 infrared data on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (imaged in visible light by the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004). “The deepest-ever near-infrared view of the universe — the HUDF09 image — has now been combined with the deepest-ever optical image — the original HUDF (taken in 2004) — to push back the frontiers of the searches for the first galaxies and to explore their nature,” Illingworth says.
    Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of Illingworth’s team and leader of a paper on the striking properties of these galaxies, says that, “the faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.”
    James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh, agrees. “These galaxies could have roots stretching into an earlier population of stars. There must be a substantial component of galaxies beyond Hubble’s detection limit.”
    Three teams worked hard to find these new galaxies and did so in a burst of papers immediately after the data were released in September, soon followed by a fourth team, and later a fifth team. The existence of these newly found galaxies pushes back the time when galaxies began to form to before 500-600 million years after the Big Bang. This is good news for astronomers building the much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (planned for launch in 2014), which will allow astronomers to study the detailed nature of primordial galaxies and discover many more even farther away. There should be a lot for Webb to hunt for.
    The deep observations also demonstrate the progressive buildup of galaxies and provide further support for the hierarchical model of galaxy assembly where small objects accrete mass, or merge, to form bigger objects over a smooth and steady but dramatic process of collision and agglomeration. It’s like streams merging into tributaries and then into a bay.
    These galaxies are as small as 1/20th the Milky Way’s diameter,” reports Pascal Oesch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Yet they are the very building blocks from which the great galaxies of today, like our own Milky Way, ultimately formed,” explains Marcella Carollo, also of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Oesch and Carollo are members of Illingworth’s team.
    These newly found objects are crucial to understanding the evolutionary link between the birth of the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and the sequence of evolutionary events that resulted in the assembly of our Milky Way and the other “mature” elliptical and majestic spiral galaxies in today’s universe.
    The HUDF09 team also combined the new Hubble data with observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to estimate the ages and masses of these primordial galaxies. “The masses are just 1 percent of those of the Milky Way,” explains team member Ivo Labbe of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, leader of two papers on the data from the combined NASA Great Observatories. He further noted that “to our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the universe.”
    The results are gleaned from the HUDF09 observations, which are deep enough at near-infrared wavelengths to reveal galaxies at redshifts from z=7 to beyond redshift z=8. (The redshift value z is a measure of the stretching of the wavelength or “reddening” of starlight due to the expansion of space.) The clear detection of galaxies between z=7 and z=8.5 corresponds to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.
    “This is about as far as we can go to do detailed science with the new HUDF09 image. This shows just how much the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is needed to unearth the secrets of the first galaxies,” says Illingworth. The challenge is that spectroscopy is needed to provide definitive redshift values, but the objects are too faint for spectroscopic observations (until JWST is launched). Therefore, the redshifts are inferred by the galaxies’ apparent colors through a now very well-established technique.
    The teams are finding that the number of galaxies per unit of volume of space drops off smoothly with increasing distance, and the HUDF09 team has also found that the galaxies become surprisingly blue intrinsically. The ultra-blue galaxies are extreme examples of objects that appear so blue because they may be deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.
    A longstanding problem with these findings is that it still appears that these early galaxies did not put out enough radiation to “reionize” the early universe by stripping electrons off the neutral hydrogen that cooled after the Big Bang. This “reionization” event occurred between about 400 million and 900 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers still don’t know which sources of light caused it to happen. These new galaxies are being seen right in this important epoch in the evolution of the universe.
    Perhaps the density of very faint galaxies below the current detection limit is so high that there may be enough of them to support reionization. Or there was an earlier wave of galaxy formation that decayed and then was “rebooted” by a second wave of galaxy formation. Or, possibly the early galaxies were extraordinarily efficient at reionizing the universe.
    Due to these uncertainties it is not clear what type of object or evolutionary process did the “heavy lifting” by ionizing the young universe. The calculations remain rather uncertain, and so galaxies may do more than currently expected, or astronomers may need to invoke other phenomena such as mini-quasars (active supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies) — current estimates suggest however that quasars are even less likely than galaxies to be the cause of reionization. This is an enigma that still challenges astronomers and the very best telescopes.
    “As we look back into the epoch of the first galaxies in the universe, from a redshift of 6 to a redshift of 8 and possibly beyond, these new observations indicate that we are likely seeing the end of reionization, and perhaps even into the reionization era, which is the last major phase transition of the gas in the universe,” says Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, leader of one of the other teams that analyzed the WFC3 data. “Though the exact interpretation of these new results remains under debate, these new WFC3 data may provide an exciting new view of how galaxy formation proceeded during and at the end of the reionization era.”
    Hubble’s WFC3/IR camera was able to make deep exposures to uncover new galaxies at roughly 40 times greater efficiency than its earlier infrared camera that was installed in 1997. The WFC3/IR brought new infrared technology to Hubble and accomplished in four days of observing what would have previously taken almost half a year for Hubble to do.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100105105209.htm

  • A Blue Moon Month

    May 1, 2007 — A blue moon is when two full moons occur within the same month, as dictated by the satellite’s 29.5 day orbit around the earth. A full moon is that point in the moon’s orbit when it’s on the back side of the earth, as seen from the sun.

    The term “once in a blue moon” means a rare occurrence, but what does it really mean? On May 31st, there will be a real blue moon in the sky, but many people still don’t know what it means.
    Kelly Beatty, the executive editor of Sky & Telescope Magazine, offered some insight to DBIS. Beatty said, “A blue moon is when you have two full moons in the same month.” So, a blue moon really means an extra full moon. It takes 29 and a half days to go from one full moon to another. But most months have either 30 or 31 days, so those extra days add up and eventually, about once every three years, we get a second full moon in the same month.
    Beatty explains why we see the moon as full, “A full moon is that point in the moon’s orbit when it’s on the back side of the earth, as seen from the sun. So as we look behind us into the night, we see the moon fully illuminated by sunlight.”
    The expression “once in a blue moon” is not a reflection of what a blue moon really is. Beatty explained it is possible, with certain atmospheric conditions, to have a moon that may be tinged blue, but the expression is just a popular phrase.
    The American Astronomical Society and the American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
    BACKGROUND: The month of May will have two full moons in the same month, a phenomenon that has come to be commonly known as a “Blue Moon.” An older definition applies to an extra full moon that occurs in one quarter of the year, which would normally have three full moons. The third of those four full moons is deemed the extra one, or the “blue moon.” According to folklore, when there is a blue moon, the moon has a face and can talk to objects bathed in its moonlight.
    ABOUT THE MOON: The moon is Earth’s only natural satellite, a cold, dry orb whose surface is studded with craters and strewn with rocks and dust. The moon’s gravitational force is only 17% of the Earth’s gravity. For example, a 100 pound (45 kg) person would weigh only 17 pounds (7.6 kg) on the Moon. The temperature on the Moon ranges from daytime highs of about 265F (130C) to nighttime lows of about -170F (-110C). The moon has no atmosphere. On the moon, the sky is always appears dark, even on the bright side (because there is no atmosphere). Also, since sound waves travel through air, the moon is silent; there can be no sound transmission on the moon. The phases of the moon are caused by the relative positions of the earth, sun, and moon. The moon goes around the earth, on average, in 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes. The sun always illuminates the half of the moon facing the sun (except during lunar eclipses, when the moon passes through the earth’s shadow). When the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth, the moon appears “full” to us, a bright, round disk. When the moon is between the earth and the sun, it appears dark, a “new” moon. In between, the moon’s illuminated surface appears to grow (wax) to full, then decreases (wanes) to the next new moon.
    SEASONAL VARIATIONS: Native American tribes in the northern and eastern United States provided a number of names for various full moons. They used them to keep track of the seasons. For instance, the Full Harvest Moon — occurring this year on September 26 — is the nearest full moon to the fall equinox, indicating the best time for the harvest. On the Full Beaver Moon, it was time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, ensuring a good supply of pelts for winter furs. Other tribes knew it was time for spring planting during the Full Corn Planting Moon, occurring this year on May 2.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0501-a_blue_moon_month.htm