Welcome !


Varun's Blog - At the Speed of Light !

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective. ~Edward Teller

A very warm welcome to my th reader.Why speed of light ? Well, the aim of this blog is to reach the impossible by exploration and scientific fervor. Exploration never ends, knowledge never dies but Speed of Light can be achieved ....

Subscribe now

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Solar Storm is coming.


Solar minimum has arrived,Sunspots have vanished & Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.

This week a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years.The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one.
Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.

The key to the mystery is a conveyor belt on the sun.
We have something similar here on Earth—the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow. It is a network of currents that carry water and heat from ocean to ocean—refer to the diagram below. In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped and threw the world's weather into chaos.
Above: Earth's "Great Ocean Conveyor Belt."


The sun's conveyor belt is a current, not of water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun's equator to the poles and back again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth, this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically, it controls the sunspot cycle.
What sunspots are--tangled knots of magnetism generated by the sun's inner dynamo. A typical sunspot exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a 'corpse' of weak magnetic fields."

Enter the conveyor belt.
"The top of the conveyor belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up the magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The 'corpses' are dragged down at the poles to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun's magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant and float back to the surface." Presto—new sunspots!



All this happens with massive slowness. It takes about 40 years for the belt to complete one loop. The speed varies "anywhere from a 50-year pace (slow) to a 30-year pace (fast)."

When the belt is turning "fast," it means that lots of magnetic fields are being swept up, and that a future sunspot cycle is going to be intense.
Who's right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming.

Read More...

Thursday, March 09, 2006

UnExplore Universe

The facts available about "Universe" on various websites/books are under big question marks ???

As most of these Facts are cooked around the "Facts" assumed by people living in "Imaginary World" and "Information" provided by few agencies.

Most of these facts are already available in one or the other form in Ancient Vedas - If we start Exploring things from them, we will have better picture of it. A number of old indian researchers have already worked alot in this area. Somehow due to lack of resources and encouragement, they had stopped their researches in betweeen as part of Brahmanda Shastra/Vigyan. We need to combine this "Gyan" with modern tools to actually know Whats and Hows of the Brahmanda/the Universe.

You will not belive but if ONE calculates correctly using information and methods provided in Vedas, one can actually calculate exact relative position of each and every object present in Brahmanda without using any modern tool.

So UnExplore to Explore Universe

Read More...

Alien life does NOT mean intelligence...

Consider this: Signs of life are found on a planet, say, Venus (this is just an example), it definitely DOES NOT mean that we have found beings who will come around in flying saucers to say "hi". If the life forms are nothing more than worms, we will call them aliens.

This is exactly why the SETI is the "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence". It does not search for alien life, it searches for alien intelligence. Therefore, even if some form of life was living within jupiter, we wouldnt know until the day we make an explorer heat resistant enough to go there.

Read More...

Monday, March 06, 2006

Why isn't the universe burning ?


Firstly I should mention that there is another fabulous discovery in the solar system. Jupiter has another red spot.Christopher Go of the Philippines photographed it on February 27th using an 11-inch telescope and a CCD camera:


There are trillions and trillions of galaxies in the universe which in turn have billions of massive stars.So why isn’t the universe hot ? Instead it is freezingly cold.Why doesn’t the universe burn due to heat.Some people would argue that the space is all vacuum but its not like that everywhere.Some places are still having matter like regions of dark matter instead of vacuum.

The thing is energy infact Heat travels from the stars to other parts of the universe through the process of radiation and in this process there is no need of any medium.This is so because heat infact Light travels in the form of electromagnetic waves which are transverse in nature and don’t require a medium for propagation.

Now the light (carrying heat) reaches other planets or I should say heavenly bodies which in turn get heated up and the heat is generated on them and in their surroundings. In all this process the medium stays unaffected hence the space remains unaffected and the universe remains unaffected.Due to this reason its very cold.

Read More...

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Do other universes exist ?

Do nearly exact copies of you exist in other universes? If one or more of the multiverse hypotheses is correct, then quite possibly they do.


The universe started with an explosion called big bang which occured 14 billion years ago.Ever since the universe is expanding.It was an explosion "of" space, not an explosion "in" space.

In earlier times people thought the earth is flat.According to Ptolemy,the Earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars and the five planets known at that time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

This is one of the analogy I can put forward.It is called Balloon analogy.A good way to help visualise the expanding universe is to compare space with the surface of an expanding balloon.COnsider a balloon with dots marked on its surface.If the balloon is blown up the distances between the dots increase in the same way as the distances between the galaxies.Universe - balloon , galaxies - dots on the balloon.The surface is homogeneous with no point which should be picked out as the centre. The centre of the balloon itself is not on the surface and should not be thought of as the centre of the universe.So to say that what is the centre of the universe becomes a little meaningless.... read this ....

1. The 2-dimensional surface of the balloon is analogous to the 3 dimensions of space.
2. The 3-dimensional space in which the balloon is embedded is not analogous to any higher dimensional physical space.
3. The centre of the balloon does not correspond to anything physical.
4. The universe may be finite in size and growing like the surface of an expanding balloon but it could also be infinite.
5. Galaxies move apart like points on the expanding balloon but the galaxies themselves do not expand because they are gravitationally bound.

Till now people go by the hubble theory that galaxies are moving far apart due to the continuing expansion force.Rest is exploration based.We cannot assume - We have to EXPLORE and then match our observations with theoretical concept.

Read More...

This is science !

When you are speaking to technically illiterate people you must resort to the plausible falsehood instead of the difficult truth.

Photos of Comet Mcnaught !
Astro-photographer? Send your photos to pics@exploreuniverse.com and have them featured on this blog with your name. Comet Mcnaught : Pictures taken with Nikon D100 on 19/1/07 from Manning Point, northern NSW, Australia by Mr. Peter Enright.
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4

Space News

Astronomy Picture of the Day