Astrogeekz - The Astronomy club of SVNIT

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with one half to Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity” and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”

These three laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole. Roger Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.

Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist, these super-heavyweight monsters that capture everything that enters them. Nothing can escape, not even light.

In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His ground-breaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez each lead a group of astronomers that, since the early 1990s, has focused on a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy. The orbits of the brightest stars closest to the middle of the Milky Way have been mapped with increasing precision. The measurements of these two groups agree, with both finding an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds. Around four million solar masses are packed together in a region no larger than our solar system.

Using the world’s largest telescopes, Genzel and Ghez developed methods to see through the huge clouds of inter-stellar gas and dust to the centre of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research. Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

“The discoveries of this year’s laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole,” says David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Press release: https://bit.ly/309oZqF
Popular information: https://bit.ly/3jjZSJk
Advanced information: https://bit.ly/3kEwwFI

The Institute of Astrophysics of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with the support of the CATA Centre for Astrophysics and Related Technologies and the Vice-Rectory for Research of PUC, is hosting a virtual talk series entitled the "Golden Week of Webinars in Astrophysics" from June 8th to 12th 2020, to present the latest important research in the area of astrophysics and cosmology.

All talks will be held in English. To participate, check out the link below.

The times and schedules correspond to continental Chile Standard Time (CLT = IST-9h30m).

http://astro.uc.cl/en/item-3-menu-izquierdo-2/561-invitation-to-participate-in-the-golden-week-of-webinars-in-astrophysics

The IUCAA Summer School, connected with the Refresher course for University faculty, in Astronomy and Astrophysics, fully online this year on zoom and youtube, has gone very well so far. It started on 11 May and has now entered its fourth week today, with another week to go.

I started off the School with four introductory lectrues in the first week, and it is my opportunity again to give two more lectures on "Galaxies: groups, clusters and superclusters".

Tuesday 2 June and Thursday 4 June, 10.00 am.

Youtube:
tinyurl.com/iucaa-channel

Schedule: https://tinyurl.com/issaa2020

Recorded lectures:
https://tinyurl.com/iucaa-recordings

ISSAA2020

Checkout http://www.worldscienceu.com/

And As they say

“Immerse Yourself in the World of Science”

The registration for SWANtenna20(the SWAN Antenna Design
Challenge 2020) is now open.

In this challenge the team will have to design and develop a novel broadband dual-polarization antenna element suitable for astronomical observations at low radio frequencies, which
could form the basic element of the proposed large size SWAN arrays.

Please visit https://bit.ly/SWANtenna20 for related details, as mentioned in the attached poster/announcement.

Hey, are you interested in contributing to Gravitational Waves Research, then check out, Gravity Spy.


In Gravitational Waves Analysis, we use the process of match filtering through which the signal is detected despite being embedded in noise.

However, for detecting the very weak signal of GW, the detector should be quite sensitive, thus despite everything it’s still vulnerable to a variety of instrumental and environmental disturbances which can obscure the GW signature, these waveforms are called Glitches.

There is a wide range of sources that can produce Glitches, hence the idea out of this is to train a model for glitches to safeguard against false positives.

Gravity Spy, a project on Zooniverse, provides regular people with the capability to contribute in training this model.



Check more about Gravity Spy here –
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/gravity-spy/about/research

Learn more about Zooniverse here –
https://www.zooniverse.org/

Learn more about Glitches here –
https://astrobites.org/2018/05/28/things-that-go-bump-in-the-detector-dealing-with-glitches-in-ligo-data/

More GW Related Activities here –
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/activities-try-home

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Source: planetary.org

Hey Guys,

Here we are, with the first consignment from Astro-Mania,
A lecture on Universe or Multi-Verse by Professor Andrei Linde.

Professor Andrei Linde is a distinguished Russian-American Theoretical Physicist with numerous awards like Gamow Prize(2018), The Kavli Prize(2014), Fundamental Physics Prize(2012), Gruber Prize(2004), Dirac Medal(2002), Oskar Klein Medal(2002).

He is one of the main authors of Inflationary Universe Theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and the inflationary multiverse.
In-short, he has been one of the foremost architects of our theoretical understanding of Cosmology.

Oppenheimer Lecture Series of UC Berkeley provides the opportunity to learn from some of the brilliant theorists in the world, like in this lecture from Prof. Linde.

In this lecture, Prof. Linde aims to describe the status of his theory given the 2015 observational data of the Planck Satellite, along with providing reasonable arguments in favour of the multiverse.

The lecture contains numerous intriguing concepts explained beautifully by Prof. Linde with the assistance of just the right amount of humour.

Enjoy Watching!!!!

Link to the lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlHvQLxb4cw

Bonus Read:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c2ae/cad2d252c7b45a2eb11f6e6ec5ebfd14fa7f.pdf

We are now on Instagram too: https://www.instagram.com/astrogeekz_svnit/

Stay tuned for further updates!

2015 Oppenheimer Lecture: Universe or Multi-verse by Andrei Linde Cosmological observations show that the universe is very uniform on the maximally large scale accessible to our telescopes. The best theoretical explanation ...

“What a life if full of care, we don’t have time to stand and stare.”

Our country has been in a lock down for more than a month now and it would take quite some time for everything to get back to normal. The entire world is facing a similar kind of situation. Our prayers are with the patients and the corona warriors who are battling this pandemic.

In times like these, when there is a global crisis, it's difficult to be at our best. But we are in this together. History has witnessed mankind emerge victorious against such pandemics.

Something similar happened about 400 years ago. Isaac Newton was just another student at Trinity College, Cambridge; when the great plague of London hit. Government offices, schools, colleges and businesses were forced to shut down so as to slow down the spread of the disease. Cambridge sent students home to continue their studies. It was during this time that Newton sat under the tree, was bonked on the head by an apple (as it is said) and discovered the theories of gravity and motion. He acquired a few prisms and experimented with them in his bedroom. From this sprung his theories on optics. Thus, he set an example for us. We may not be Newtons and Einsteins but who said we cannot try to be one?

We at Astrogeekz - The Astronomy club of SVNIT believe that now is time to make hay while the sun shines. On the occasion of Astronomy day, we proudly present to you 'Astro-mania'. This is our online outreach program, where we will be posting about the various courses on Astronomy and Astrophysics to keep you hitched to Astronomy. But we are not going to stop here. We will also be posting exciting informative info-graphics, quizzes, articles, poems, games and lot more to keep boredom miles away from you during this lock down.

So are you ready to get along with us on this perfect roller coaster ride that will transform your mundane vacation into the one that gives you a rush of adrenaline?

Here is the link to our FB page: https://www.facebook.com/astroweek/

We are now on Instagram too: https://www.instagram.com/astrogeekz_svnit/

Stay tuned for further updates!

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