James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is to be launched in 2019. It is considered to be a successor of Hubble. NASA has this awesome 3 D model of it where you can zoom into its components and view detailed information about its components and instruments. Check it out here https://jwst.nasa.gov/Webb3d/


Image result

Comments

Post a Comment

Acobot Widget

Popular posts from this blog

Galaxies #2 - Elliptical Galaxies

Image
Elliptical galaxies, like the name suggests have an elliptical shape with no specific axis of rotation. Elliptical galaxies are classified on the basis of their eccentricity, ie how much they deviate from a circle. The class starts from E0 which are the most circular galaxies to E7 which are the most elliptical in shape. Elliptical galaxies are also divided into stages. Compact elliptical galaxies are denoted by cE, normal ellipses just by E and late elliptical galaxies by E+. For example the galaxy M32, located in the constellation Andromeda is denoted cE2. It looks like this. It is clearly seen that it is only slightly elliptical and hence denoted by 2. Another elliptical galaxy is M59 which is more elliptical than M32 and hence designated as E5. It looks like this.
Read more

A binary star to the SUN ?!

Image
A less likely possibility. An upper limit of distance between two binary stars is around o.25 light years. Considering that and the fact that we are able to observe stars and celestial objects with apparent magnitudes up to 32, we get using the expression… (where m = apparent magnitude i.e., 32 in this case, M = absolute magnitude, r is distance in parsecs ) M ≈ 42.57 This value is so high ( meaning that the star is too dim ). In fact the dimmest red dwarfs ever observed, are only about 15 - 20 in absolute magnitude. If we still want to theoretically prove it wrong, we can go ahead and use the Stefan- Boltzmann Law to make an attempt to find its surface temperature. Assuming a Sun sized binary star, with an area of 6.09 * 10 ^18 m^2, plugging in some values we get T, the surface temperature of the binary star to be a mere 1.02 Kelvin. If we try to make the size of the binary star even smaller, ( in an attempt to increase the surface temperature) by pushing it ...
Read more

Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid ( or is it ? )

Image
Discovered by the Pan-Starrs telescope in October 2017, this rocky body has been claimed to be the  first interstellar body  to enter the solar system. It is interstellar in the sense it came from a different star system. This was determined by studying its orbit, and its chemical composition. It was found to have a higher velocity ( around 320,000 kilometres per hour ) than it would have if it orbited the Sun, hence it must have been from somewhere else. ( Of course, the below image is a piece of an artist’s imagination of how it would look like ). The asteroid was also weirdly shaped like an elongated cigar, which drew media attention, who hypothesised that it could be an alien spaceship. After some debate, a paper was published in March 2018 which said that Oumuamua was in fact, a comet and not an interstellar asteroid as it was previously claimed. This was established with some evidence relating to its trajectory through the Solar System. It was expected to go ...
Read more