India’s first ambitious lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 lost its contact with ISRO on Saturday August 29, 2009 after ten months of its launch. According to ISRO officials this mission is over now, and it has completed 90-95% of the technical work, it was intended to do.
Chandrayaan - 1
Chandrayaan 1: Launch and Achievements
Chandrayaan 1 was launched on October 22, 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota by PSLV-C11. It completed 312 days in orbit and making 3400 orbits around the moon. It was equipped with sophisticated sensors such as terrain mapping camera, hyper-spectral imager and moon mineralogy mapper, meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission.
Chandrayaan 1 sent nearly 70,000 amazing images of surface of moon which includes mountains and craters especially at moon’s polar region. It also collected critical information about chemical and mineral content of moon.
Madhavan Nair, the ISRO chief admitted that Mission Chandrayaan has come to an end, although it is a difficult situation.
He says:
“At the moment, we have suspended the mission. Calling it off would depend on what has failed. We are trying to analyze what has gone wrong and we will take a look at it tomorrow.”
Problems with Chandrayaan 1:
Scientists are still analyzing the reasons of this unexpected problem that came with Chandrayaan, but it may be caused due to the malfunctioning of star sensor that determines the orientation of spacecraft. This sensor started created problems four month back before this mission ended. Also one of the bus management units failed. There was also an overheating problem necessitating the deactivation of some of the 11 payloads.
Black Holes have always fascinated scientist due to their mysterious properties, but there is much to be learned about them. These strange regions once thought to be absent of light before research found that actually these are the regions with such an extreme gravitational force that nothing, not even light can escape from their surface.
Black Holes
According to a latest invention Black Holes (imitation of Black Hole actually) can be reproduce in laboratory now!
Black Holes: What are they?
Let’s understand it through the example of our own earth:
The mass of earth creates the gravity the pulls the things towards it. With enough power we can escape the earth’s gravitational force. This is how space vehicles leave the earth’s atmosphere.
Now if we squeeze the size of earth to that of a marble. This will increase the mass and gravitational force of earth to such extent that it would be impossible to bypass that force. Black holes are also regions with such a large mass and gravitational force that not even light can escape from them. Due to this it is not possible to view Black holes, but their presence can be realized only by the nearby activities.
Till now scientist have done extensive research about these strange regions in the universe. We know how they born, where they occur, and why they exists in different sizes, but there is much to know about them.
How to Know More about Black Holes?:
Dartmouth researchers have now proposed a new way to explore Black Holes. They plan to reproduce the black hole at a smaller scale in laboratory. A paper has been published in this regard in Physical Review Letters, August 20 issue.
This method of creating tiny black holes of quantum size will help scientist to understand the insights of Black holes. Stephen Hawking, eminent space scientist had proposed that, Black Holes are not totally void of activity and they emit radiations in the form of photon. This radiation is known as Hawking Radiation or Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.
According to Paul Nation, a co-author of paper and Dartmouth graduate student,
“Hawking famously showed that black holes radiate energy according to a thermal spectrum. His calculations relied on assumptions about the physics of ultra-high energies and quantum gravity. Because we can’t yet take measurements from real black holes, we need a way to recreate this phenomenon in the lab in order to study it, to validate it.”
Scientist has shown that how a magnetic field-pulse microwave transmission line containing an array of superconducting quantum interference devices can reproduce physics analogous to a radiating black hole. This system can be controlled in laboratory and quantum mechanics properties. They can also manipulate the strength of applied magnetic field.
Past Attempts in this Field:
Creation of Black Holes in Laboratory has been proposed before by scientists. It has been proposed using supersonic fluid flows, ultracold bose-einstein condensates and nonlinear fiber optic cables. But the main problem in these schemes was weak Hawking radiation or masked radiation due to overheating of device. This latest scheme is much more efficient than previous proposed models.
Authors of Paper:
This paper has been written by Paul Nation, Alexander Rimberg, Eyal Buks and Miles Blencowe.
Scientist have found hyperactive galaxies while looking 11 billion year in past. They have measured the speed of stars in a distant galaxy that is around 11 billion light year far from us and found that stars are rotating at a speed of 1 million mile per hour. This speed is twice the speed of our sun in Milky Way Galaxy.
Comparison of Milky Way and Compact Galaxy
Scientists used combined power of Hubble Space Telescope of NASA and 8-meter Gemini South Telescope in Chile. While Hubble found that size of these distant galaxies are a fraction of the galaxies we see today, Gemini telescope is used to clock their speed using Spectroscopy.
According to Pieter van Dokkum, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University and head of this project, the galaxy they have seen is very small as compared to all modern galaxies like our own Milky Way. But the motion of stars is as if they were in a giant galaxy. Now it is matter of discussion that how it is possible for these galaxies containing so much mass in such a small volume can form in early universe and then evolve into galaxies like we see in near universe.
The team behind this research combined data from NASA,s Hubble Telescope and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. While data collected by Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that the galaxy under observation is very small than the galaxies we see today, 8-meter Gemini telescope measured the motion of stars.
In words of Mariska Kriek of Princeton University, New Jersy, a team member in this research:
“By looking at this galaxy we are able to look back in time and see what galaxies looked like in the distant past when the universe was very young.”
What conclusion they got from this:
Right now it’s hard to say for any of astronomers that how such compact and massive galaxies form and why they are not seen in current universe. But one possibility says that it may be the dense central region of a very large galaxy that is going to form eventually. So it may be concluded that centers of big galaxies formed first in the beginning of universe.
What next?
Astronomers are planning to study the formation of these galaxies by observing galaxies in farther back in time. They will use Wide Field Camera 3, recently installed on Hubble Space Telescope.
According to van Dokkum:
“The ancestors of these extreme galaxies should have quite spectacular properties as they probably formed a huge amount of stars, in addition to a massive black hole, in a relatively short amount of time.”
Most important questions to be answered:
There are 2 most strange questions about this research:
1) How it is possible for those galaxies to contain so much mass in such a small size?
2) If it was the starting of formation of galaxies then how galaxies grew so much in past 10 billion years that we see in today universe?
To solve these problems scientist have to understand the dynamics of these young compact galaxies. We should hope that this study of past will help us to solve many more puzzles regarding the evolution of universe.
