Science Strangeries

The Black Death The Black Death was the beginning of the second plague pandemic. The plague created religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history. The origin of the Black Death is disputed. Genetic analysis points to the evolution of Yersinia pestis in the Tian Shan mountains on the border between Kyrgyzstan and China 2,600 years ago. The immediate territorial origins of the Black Death and its outbreak remains unclear, with some evidence pointing towards Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. The pandemic was reportedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea by the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg in 1347. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, Western Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula. There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague, thus explaining the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if the primary vector was rat fleas causing bubonic plague. In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may not have been due to Mongol conquests in the 14th century, as previously speculated. The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30 per cent to 60 per cent of the European population, as well as approximately 33 per cent of the population of the Middle East. There were further outbreaks throughout the Late Middle Ages and, also due to other contributing factors (the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages), the European population did not regain its 14th century level until the 16th century. Outbreaks of the plague recurred around the world until the early 19th century.

Olympus Mons : The largest Mountain in the Solar system Olympus Mons is a large shield volcano on Mars. It is over 21.9 km (13.6 mi or 72,000 ft) high, as measured by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), and is about two and a half times Mount Everest's height above sea level. It is one of Mars's largest volcanoes, its tallest planetary mountain, and is approximately tied with Rheasilvia as the tallest mountain currently discovered in the Solar System. It is associated with the Tharsis Montes, a large volcanic region on Mars. It last erupted 25 million years ago. Olympus Mons is the youngest of the large volcanoes on Mars, having formed during Mars's Hesperian Period with eruptions continuing well into the Amazonian. It has been known to astronomers since the late 19th century as the albedo feature Nix Olympica (Latin for "Olympic Snow"), and its mountainous nature was suspected well before space probes confirmed it as a mountain. It is in Mars's western hemisphere, centered at 18°39′N 226°12′E, just off the northwestern edge of the Tharsis bulge. Its western portion is in the Amazonis quadrangle (MC-8), and its central and eastern portions in the adjoining Tharsis quadrangle (MC-9). Two impact craters on Olympus Mons have been assigned provisional names by the International Astronomical Union: the 15.6-kilometre-diameter (9.7 mi) Karzok crater (18°25′N 228°05′E) and the 10.4-kilometre-diameter (6.5 mi) Pangboche crater (17°10′N 226°25′E). They are notable as two of several suspected source areas for shergottites, the most abundant class of Martian meteorites.

A Wormhole A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations. A wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both). Wormholes are consistent with the general theory of relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist remains to be seen. Many scientists postulate that wormholes are merely projections of a fourth spatial dimension, analogous to how a two-dimensional (2D) being could experience only part of a three-dimensional (3D) object. A well-known analogy of such constructs is provided by the Klein bottle, displaying a hole when rendered in three dimensions but not in four or higher dimensions. Theoretically, a wormhole might connect extremely long distances such as a billion light-years, or short distances such as a few meters, or different points in time, or even different universes. In 1995, Matt Visser suggested there may be many wormholes in the universe if cosmic strings with negative mass were generated in the early universe.Some physicists, such as Kip Thorne, have suggested how to make wormholes artificially.

The Butterfly Effect In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term is closely associated with the work of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier. Lorenz originally used a seagull causing a storm but was persuaded to make it more poetic with the use of a butterfly and tornado by 1972. He discovered the effect when he observed runs of his weather model with initial condition data that were rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner. He noted that the weather model would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome. The idea that small causes may have large effects in weather was earlier acknowledged by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré. American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener also contributed to this theory. Lorenz's work placed the concept of instability of the Earth's atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos.

A Binary Black Hole A binary black hole (BBH), or black hole binary, is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into stellar binary black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture; and binary supermassive black holes, believed to be a result of galactic mergers. For many years, proving the existence of binary black holes was made difficult because of the nature of black holes themselves and the limited means of detection available. However, in the event that a pair of black holes were to merge, an immense amount of energy should be given off as gravitational waves, with distinctive waveforms that can be calculated using general relativity. Therefore, during the late 20th and early 21st century, binary black holes became of great interest scientifically as a potential source of such waves and a means by which gravitational waves could be proven to exist. Binary black hole mergers would be one of the strongest known sources of gravitational waves in the universe, and thus offer a good chance of directly detecting such waves. As the orbiting black holes give off these waves, the orbit decays, and the orbital period decreases. This stage is called binary black hole inspiral. The black holes will merge once they are close enough. Once merged, the single hole settles down to a stable form, via a stage called ringdown, where any distortion in the shape is dissipated as more gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second the black holes can reach extremely high velocity, and the gravitational wave amplitude reaches its peak. The existence of stellar-mass binary black holes (and gravitational waves themselves) was finally confirmed when LIGO detected GW150914 (detected September 2015, announced February 2016), a distinctive gravitational wave signature of two merging stellar-mass black holes of around 30 solar masses each, occurring about 1.3 billion light-years away. In its final 20 ms of spiraling inward and merging, GW150914 released around 3 solar masses as gravitational energy, peaking at a rate of 3.6×1049 watts – more than the combined power of all light radiated by all the stars in the observable universe put together. Supermassive binary black hole candidates have been found, but not yet categorically proven.

A Binary Black Hole A binary black hole (BBH), or black hole binary, is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into stellar binary black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture; and binary supermassive black holes, believed to be a result of galactic mergers. For many years, proving the existence of binary black holes was made difficult because of the nature of black holes themselves and the limited means of detection available. However, in the event that a pair of black holes were to merge, an immense amount of energy should be given off as gravitational waves, with distinctive waveforms that can be calculated using general relativity. Therefore, during the late 20th and early 21st century, binary black holes became of great interest scientifically as a potential source of such waves and a means by which gravitational waves could be proven to exist. Binary black hole mergers would be one of the strongest known sources of gravitational waves in the universe, and thus offer a good chance of directly detecting such waves. As the orbiting black holes give off these waves, the orbit decays, and the orbital period decreases. This stage is called binary black hole inspiral. The black holes will merge once they are close enough. Once merged, the single hole settles down to a stable form, via a stage called ringdown, where any distortion in the shape is dissipated as more gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second the black holes can reach extremely high velocity, and the gravitational wave amplitude reaches its peak. The existence of stellar-mass binary black holes (and gravitational waves themselves) was finally confirmed when LIGO detected GW150914 (detected September 2015, announced February 2016), a distinctive gravitational wave signature of two merging stellar-mass black holes of around 30 solar masses each, occurring about 1.3 billion light-years away. In its final 20 ms of spiraling inward and merging, GW150914 released around 3 solar masses as gravitational energy, peaking at a rate of 3.6×1049 watts – more than the combined power of all light radiated by all the stars in the observable universe put together. Supermassive binary black hole candidates have been found, but not yet categorically proven.

Largest star known so far Stephenson 2 DFK also known as Stephenson 2-18 (abbreviated to St2-18), is an enigmaticred supergiant (RSG) or possible extreme red hypergiant star in the constellation of Scutum. It lies near the open cluster Stephenson 2, which is located about 5.8 kiloparsecs away from Earth in the Scutum–Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and is assumed to be one of a group of stars at a similar distance, although some studies consider it to be an unrelated or foreground red supergiant. It is among the largest known stars, one of the most luminous red supergiants, and one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way.Stephenson 2 DFK 1 has an estimated radius of around 2,150 solar radii, which would correspond to a volume nearly 10 billion times that of the Sun. Taking this estimate as correct, it would take nearly 9 hours to travel around its surface at the speed of light, compared to 14.5 seconds for the Sun. If placed at the center of Solar System, it would engulf the orbit of Saturn.

Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen (1H) into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most massive gas giant planets and the least massive stars, approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ). However, they can fuse deuterium (2H) and the most massive ones (> 65 MJ) can fuse lithium. Astronomers classify self-luminous objects by spectral type, a distinction intimately tied to the surface temperature, and brown dwarfs occupy types M, L, T, and Y. As brown dwarfs do not undergo stable hydrogen fusion, they cool down over time, progressively passing through later spectral types as they age.Despite their name, to the naked eye, brown dwarfs would appear in different colors depending on their temperature.The warmest ones are possibly orange or red,[6] while cooler brown dwarfs would likely appear magenta or black to the human eye.Brown dwarfs may be fully convective, with no layers or chemical differentiation by depth.Though their existence was initially theorized in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1990s that the first unambiguous brown dwarfs were discovered. As brown dwarfs have relatively low surface temperatures, they are not very bright at visible wavelengths, emitting most of their light in the infrared. However, with the advent of more capable infrared detecting devices, thousands of brown dwarfs have been identified. The nearest known brown dwarfs are located in the Luhman 16 system, a binary of L- and T-type brown dwarfs about 6.5 light-years from the Sun. Luhman 16 is the third closest system to the Sun after Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star

Kepler-452 Kepler-452 is a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the inner edge of the habitable zone of the sun-like star Kepler-452 and is the only planet in the system discovered by Kepler. It is located about 1,800 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. Kepler-452b orbits its star at a distance of 1.04 AU from its host star , with an orbital period of roughly 385 days, has a mass at least five times that of Earth, and has a radius of around 1.5 times that of Earth. It is the first potentially rocky super-Earth planet discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of a very sun-like star. However, it is unknown if it is entirely habitable, as it is receiving slightly more energy than Earth and could be subjected to a runaway greenhouse effect. The Kepler space telescope identified the exoplanet, and its discovery was announced by NASA on 23 July 2015. The planet is about 1,800 light-years away from the Solar System.

The moon is saying "Adios" Both the moon and the earth have a gravitational pull and we are ‘pulling’ so much, that it causes a bulge in the earth and the moon. You and I can’t see the ‘bulge’, but scientists have been studying it for years. The process is causing the earth’s rotation to slow down and this allows the moon to drift away, ever so slowly. 620 million years ago, one day on earth was only twenty one hours instead of the twenty four we have today. We have proof that the moon is moving slowly away. During one of the manned missions to the moon they left some technology there to help the scientists measure the distance between the earth and the moon. Through these studies, they have found out that each year, our moon is drifting away at 1-2 cm. This is causing our earth days to get longer by 1/500th of a second each century, as the rotation of the earth slows.