Astro Club, BITS Pilani

12/08/2019

Recently one of our seniors, Ujjwal Panda, started a blog: Research Student Diaries. With articles spanning all disciplines, from physics and astronomy to chemistry and biology, the blog also discusses his own personal experiences with research, starting from how he and other students from BITS Pilani built a radio telescope to observe radio storms on Jupiter.

Read, like, comment and share! The link is given below.

My thoughts on research and science

06/08/2019

"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
- Stephen Hawking

If the fascinating stellar objects instill a sense of wonder and gets you thinking about the bigger picture and makes you want to study the night sky yourself, then do turn up for the interactions.

Date: 6th and 7th August
Time: 6-8 PM
Venue: Rotunda

30/05/2019

These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at the heart of M16, or the Eagle Nebula. The aptly named Pillars of Creation, featured in this stunning Hubble image, are part of an active star-forming region within the nebula and hide newborn stars in their wispy columns.

The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen. Stretching roughly 4 to 5 light-years, the Pillars of Creation are a fascinating but relatively small feature of the entire Eagle Nebula, which spans 70 by 55 light-years.

Discover the cosmos with us!
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22/05/2019

In the pre-dawn of May 22, ISRO successfully launched 615-kg RISAT-2B satellite, the country's newest Earth observation satellite, capable of clear viewing during the day, night and even under adverse weather conditions, at 5:30 AM on Wednesday.

Radar Imaging Earth Observation Satellite, RISAT-2B, the third in the RISAT series, was launched by ISRO from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota. With a mission life of five years, data that will come from the X-band radar day and night satellite are considered to be vital for the armed forces and will send us good clarity images for use in agriculture, forestry and disaster management support.

If all goes well, two clones – RISAT-BR1 and RISAT-2BR2 - will be launched in the coming months. The next launch for ISRO is the prestigious Chandrayaan-2 mission!

Image Credit: ISRO

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26/04/2019

The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 29th Birthday in April 2019!

To mark the occasion, it premiered this image of multi-legged appearance of the Southern Crab Nebula. About 7,000 light-years distant toward the southern sky constellation Centaurus, its glowing nested hourglass shapes are produced by the remarkable symbiotic binary star system at its center. The bright central shape is about half a light-year across. This new Hubble Space Telescope image celebrates Hubble's launch in April, 1990 on board Space Shuttle Discovery.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

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12/04/2019

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy successfully launched its first operational mission today, sticking a triple-rocket landing.

All three of the rocket’s booster cores successfully landed back on Earth. The two outer cores of the rocket touched down on SpaceX’s two concrete landing pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida near the site of the launch. The center core touched down on one of the company’s drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean.

Image Credits :

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11/04/2019

Meet Katie Bouman, the MIT graduate, who led the development of the algorithm which made it possible to capture the first image ever of a Black Hole.

The algorithm, which Bouman named CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors) was needed to combine data from the eight radio telescopes around the world working under Event Horizon Telescope, the international collaboration that captured the black hole image, and turn it into a cohesive image.

Kudos to her and the whole team!

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11/04/2019

Putting things into perspective!

Black hole at the center of M87 galaxy as compared to our solar system.

Image Credits : xkcdcomic

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10/04/2019

First ever image of black hole released!

The Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first real-life picture of the supermassive singularity at the center of the Galaxy M87.

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth.

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10/04/2019

When we talk about the enormity of the cosmos, it’s easy to toss out big numbers, but far harder to wrap our minds around just how large, how far and how numerous celestial bodies like planets, stars really are!

Credits : NASA

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09/04/2019

This beast is 10,000 times more massive than the black hole at the center of our galaxy (or equivalent to 40 billion solar masses)

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08/04/2019

Mars' magnetic tail shaped and twisted by the solar wind.

Magnetic fields around planets are a shielding buffer between the surface and the stream of charged particles that emanate from the Sun. Mars lost its global magnetic field billions of years ago and what remains is a patchwork of smaller remnant magnetic fields embedded in certain regions of its surface.

Credits: NASA

Discover the cosmos with us!
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