In the winter sky the most dominant feature of the night sky is an ancient constellation of Orion the hunter accompanied by his two dogs Canis Major and. Canis Minor. Sirius, the brightest night sky from Big dog and a bright red star Betelgeuse, making the right shoulder of this giant Hunter and Procyon of […]
In our solar system all four inner planets are different from outer gas giants. Gas giants Jupiter, Saturn and ice giants Uranus and Neptune are more or less very similar to each other in the composition made up of hydrogen and helium and traces of other gases. Inner planets are rocky with some or no […]
Venus is the brightest of wandering stars, the planet is so bright one can not miss it. It is always viable near the setting or rising sun and never wanders more than 47 degrees away from the Sun. When it is visible in the morning Greeks initially called it star Phosphorus and when visible in […]
Representational image of hale Bopp Comets are notorious for not ‘performing’ as expected. But this comet from beyond the realm of planets and dwarf planets like Pluto and outermost reaches of the Solar system is probably paying a visit to its Sun for the first and last time. Till I am writing this Comet C/2030 […]
One of the most successful theories of modern science is the Big Bang but it is also one of the most misunderstood ones too. Misunderstanding started with the name ‘Big Bang’ itself as it was not given by the scientist who proposed this theory to explain the origin of the universe but by the scientists […]
When Sir Issac Newton defined Laws of Motion and Gravity, the Solar system had become a very ordered place. Celestial mechanics is derived from these simple laws of motions and gravity. Mediaeval philosophers imagined these planets either as gods or demigods moving forward and retrograde at their whims to make life earthly humans mostly difficult […]
Copernicus by removing earth from the centre of the Universe and by placing it in the orbit around an ordinary star our Sun (and consequently later astronomers placing that star one among hundreds of billions in an ordinary galaxy in an a universe that has hundreds of billions of galaxies) has made the biggest revolution […]
Our ancestors took the Sun for granted. Unlike the Moon it doesn’t change its shape/phase or its brightness on its own doesn’t change, unless its light is blocked by dust fog or clouds. In the morning Sun rises everyday without fail and sets in the evening without fail. Apart from this nothing about the Sun […]
We think we will know a planet when we see one. That is not true. To an uninitiated observer, a planet looks like a bright star. Ancient people have divided stars into two kinds: fixed stars and wandering stars. Fixed stars don’t change their position relative to other stars. So if you see one pattern […]
