Astronauts Can Now Escape From An Exploding Rocket

NASA has spent $220 million on testing a new escape system rocket in New Mexico on this Thursday dummy crew module more than a mile up in just 20 seconds to demonstrate how a future manned spacecraft could be pulled to safety in the event of a catastrophic on-pad rocket failure.

A solid-fuel motor was used which generated some 500,000 pounds of thrust, the launch abort system ignited with a torrent of orange fire and smoke pulling the dummy crew module to nearly 450 mph in just 2.5 seconds with an acceleration of 16 times the force of gravity.

The heavily instrumented capsule, which will not be used again, hit the ground two minutes and 14 seconds or so after launch, 6,919 feet from its takeoff point. Touchdown velocity was 16 mph, about 6 mph slower than predicted.

"It's a great day for the country, for NASA and for industry," said NASA Test Conductor Don Reed. "It was absolutely successful. We didn't see anything anomalous. Everything worked as it was expected. In fact, we actually touched down at significantly less velocity than we predicted. The performance was absolutely astounding."

Now our astronauts can land safely in case of rocket failure.

Extraterrestrials Do Exist , But Don't Try Talking To Them

World's leading scientist Stefen Hawkins says that extraterrestrials are out there and we humans should avoid them . We are all aware of the fact that aliens are one of the biggest mysteries of our Universe. He believes that aliens are not just in planets but also in stars or may be even they are floating in interplanetary space .His logic is that the Earth is not the only place where life has evolved and we need to find out that how the aliens look like.

He has published his documentary series where in one scene shows nerds of two- legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff - face where they are picked off by flying , yellow lizard- like predators . Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa , which is one of the moon of Jupiter.

Hawkins is using these scenes to lead us to serious thought that the aliens could be intelligent and can pose threat to human lives.

He says that aliens could just raid our planet for resources and then move on.

Acoording to him , " We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet . I imagine they might exist in massive ships , having used up all the resources from their home planet . Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads , looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

Hubble Finds A Planet With A Tail Like A Comet

Hubble Space telescope has discovered a planet which has a tail like a comet! HD 209458b planet is about 153 light years and was found in the year 2003.

Scientists have measured the gas coming out from the planet.

Scientists have used Hubble to find about the atmosphere of the planet as it crossed infront of its star.

HD 209458 b is an extrasolar planet (unofficially referred to as "Osiris") that orbits theSolar analog star HD 209458 in the constellation Pegasus, some 150 light-years from Earth's solar system, with evidence of water vapor. The radius of the planet's orbit is 7 million kilometres, about 0.047 astronomical units, or one eighth the radius of Mercury's orbit. This small radius results in a year that is 3.5 Earth days long and an estimated surface temperature of about 1,000 °C (about 1,800 °F). Its mass is 220 times that of Earth (0.69 Jupiter masses) and its volume is some 2.5 times greater than that of Jupiter. The high mass and great volume of HD 209458 b indicate that it is a gas giant.

HD 209458 b represents a number of milestones in extraplanetary research. It was the first of many categories: a transiting extrasolar planet discovered, an extrasolar planet known to have an atmosphere, an extrasolar planet observed to have an evaporating hydrogen atmosphere, an extrasolar planet found to have an atmosphere containing oxygen and carbon, and one of the first two extrasolar planets to be directly observed spectroscopically. Based on the application of new, theoretical models, as of April 2007, it is alleged to be the first extrasolar planet found to have water vapor in its atmosphere.

On 23 June 2010, astronomers announced they have measured a superstorm (with windspeeds of up to 7000 km/h) for the first time in the atmosphere of HD 209458 b. The very high-precision observations done by ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its powerful CRIRES spectrograph of carbon monoxide gas show that it is streaming at enormous speed from the extremely hot day side to the cooler night side of the planet. The observations also allow another exciting “first”—measuring the orbital speed of the exoplanet itself, providing a direct determination of its mass.

HD 209458 is an 8th magnitude star, visible from Earth with binoculars.

Big Bang Theory : An Overview

Have you ever given a thought that how our Universe came into be? Our Universe was created in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded at a rapid state and then cooled and it is expanding even now today.The fact is interesting isn't it?

When our Universe came into existence there was NOTHING at all and Big Bang theory gives an explanation to this.



Big Bang theory has been developed by taking theoretical assumptions and observations together by George Lemaitre in 1927 by taking into consideration Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity and proposed and this model was being called "explosion" of a "primeval atom" which later came to be known as Big Bang theory.


In the year 1929 Hubble suggested that the Universe was expanding, contracting the infinite and is changing the "static universe" theory as proposed by Einstein. In "static universe" theory Einstein explained that our Universe is neither expanding nor it is contracting.



According to Big Bang theory after a long period of time the dense matter due to gravitational pull formed stars, galaxies, planets and other heavenly bodies which we find today.

Universe is in the form of dark energy today and near about 72% of the energy of Universe is in this form.

Misconceptions of Big Bang theory:

The most common misconception about Big Bang is that we assume that there was an explosion in the Universe but the experts say that there is an "expansion" and due to this "expansion" things in Universe are moving away from us.

There is no evidence of Big Bang theory as there is no explanation to the concept of what could have caused "Big Bang".

Big Bang theory gives no explanation to the existence of God. It is being believed that the Universe is a super natural creation by God. It gives no explanation to the fact whether God created Universe.

What Lies Beyond the Observable Hubble Universe?

Few theories qualify for Nobel laureate Niels Bohr's famous question more than the current Big Bang Theory of the origin of the Universe: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

There is a growing body of data and theory which question whether the Universe may have begun with a Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago. Several leading cosmologists, such as Sean Carroll of CalTech and Neil Turok of Cambridge University challenge the prevailing model of a "Big Bang" and believe that in the future we will only look back in wonder at how anyone could have believed in a creation event which was refuted by so much evidence. 

The origin of the Big Bang (that is, the state of "existence" which resulted in a Big Bang) is a mathematically obscure state --- a "singularity" of zero volume that contained infinite density and infinite energy. Why this singularity existed, how it originated, and why it exploded has led many scientists to question and challenge the very foundations of the Big Bang theory. 

It has been pointed out that an accelerated expansion limited to the most distant regions of the known universe, is incompatible with an explosive origin, but instead is indicative of an attractive force --- a "universe-in-mass" black hole whose super-gravity is affecting red shifts and illumination --- creating the illusion of a universe which is accelerating as it speeds away, when instead the stars closest to the hole are speeding faster toward their doom. Other scientists observe that the interpretation of red shifts as supporting a Big Bang, is also flawed and lacking validity. Some experts believe that there is little evidence to support the belief that red shifts are accurate measures of distance or time; that they are so variable and affected by so many factors that estimates of age, time, and distance can vary by up to 3 billion years following repeated measurements of the same star over just a few years.

Although the "Big Bang" is often presented as if it is proven fact, there is a wealth of data, including recent revelations of the several space probes and findings in fundamental physics, which possibly tell a different story.

One of the first problems are found in the Large Scale Structures in the Universe. In recent years, there have been a number of very serious challenges to the current theory of cosmic evolution and the belief the universe began just 13.7 billion years ago. The existence of these "Superclusters", "Great Walls" and "Great Attractors" could have only come to be organized and situated in their present locations and to have achieved their current size in a universe which is at least 80 billion to 250 billion years in age. The largest superclusters --- for example, the  "Coma" --- extend up to 100 Mpc!

In 1986, Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii reported detecting superclusters of galaxies 300 million light years (mly) long and 100 mly thick - stretching out about 300 mly across. At the speeds at which galaxies are supposed to be moving, it would require 80 billlion years to create such a huge complex of galaxies.

In 1989 a group led by John Huchra and Margaret J. Geller at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered "The Great Wall", a series of galaxies lined up and creating a "wall" of galaxies 500 million light years (mly) long, 200 mly wide, and 15 mly thick. This superstructure would have required at least 100 billion years to form.

A team of the British, American, and Hungarian astronomers have reported even larger structures. As per their findings, the universe is crossed by at least 13 'Great Walls', apparent rivers of galaxies 100Mpc long in the surveyed domain of 7 billion light years. They found galaxies clustered into bands spaced about 600 million light years apart. The pattern of these clusters stretches across about one-fourth of the diameter of the universe, or about seven billion light years. This huge shell and void pattern would have required nearly 150 billion years to form, based on their speed of movement, if produced by the standard Big Bang cosmology.

Sloane_9, The "Sloan Great Wall" of galaxies as detected by the Sloan Digital Survey, has earned the distinction of being the largest observed structure in the Universe. It is 1.36 billion light years long and 80% longer than the Great Wall discovered by Geller and Huchra. It runs roughly from the head of Hydra to the feet of Virgo. It would have taken at least 250 billion years to form.

Then there is the problem of gravity. "Hubble length" Universe, which consists of those galaxies and stars which can be observed by current technology, appears, therefore, to be organized as titanic walls and clusters of galaxies separated by a collection of giant bubble-like voids. The Great Walls are far too large and massive to have been formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of its member galaxies alone.

Based on the cosmological principle, which is one of the cornerstones of the Big Bang model, cosmologists predicted the distribution of matter to be homogeneous throughout the universe, implying thereby that the distribution of the galaxies would be essentially uniform. There would be no large scale clusters of galaxies or great voids in space. Instead, contrary to the "Big Bang" universe, we exist in a very "lumpy" cosmos.

Many of the world's leading physicists believe we are entering  a "golden age" of cosmological discoveries. Astronomers working on the WMAP mission stunned the scientific community with their announcement that the first generation stars in the universe were surprisingly born just after 200 million years of the Big Bang birth of the cosmos. The age of the universe has been steadily pushed backwards in time, from 2 billion year to 8 billion after it was determined the Earth was 4.6 billion years in age, and now the estimates are 13.75 billion years.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), successor to the HST with ten times the light-gathering power due to be launched in 2014, may well detect ever more distant galaxies. Likewise, the ultra-high resolution radio telescopes such as Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile which is to become operational in 2012, will be peering still deeper into the universe, and probably pushing the hypothetical Big Bang further backward in time as ever more distant galaxies are detected.