Infinity-Science

The telescope was invented in 1608 when spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey's apprentice was playing games. The apprentice was amusing himself with lenses and found a combination that made things seem closer. When Lippershey was shown this combination, he enclosed the lenses at two ends of a tube.

Cosmologists believe most galaxies have a super-massive black hole at their centre, with a mass of between 1 million, or billions of times that of the Sun. All of a black hole's matter is crushed into a tiny point of infinite gravity called a singularity. Science's understanding of physics, space, and time breaks down beyond the black hole's event horizon, the boundary of no return where not even light has the speed to escape its immense gravity

Astronaut Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon with his left foot.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane-like storm system that was first detected in the early 1600s.

A single Quasar produces the same amount of energy as 1 trillion suns.

Neptune has the fastest measured wind speeds in the solar system: 600 meters/second, or 1350 mph.

The Earth circles around the Sun at about 107,000 kilometres per hour. Our Solar System is rotating around the Milky Way galaxy at about 700,000 kilometres per hour. The galaxy is also travelling at huge speed away from every other galaxy as the universe continues to expand, although with vastly differing relative speeds depending on the distances of the galaxies from us. To give some indication, scientists have calculated that our galaxy is travelling at about 2.2 million kilometres per hour relative to the cosmic background radiation which pervades the universe.

About 1000 Earths would fit inside Jupiter - and the Sun could hold about 1000 Jupiters.

One year on Pluto is equal to 248 Earth years.

The moon weighs 81 billion tons.

Comet Hale-Bopp is putting out approximately 250 tons of gas and dust per second. This is about 50 times more than most comets produce.

Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, is galaxy located at a distance of about 2.5 million light years, and is therefore the nearest galaxy to our planet apart from smaller companion galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds.

Active galaxy NGC 1275 lies at the heart of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, it has huge filaments of gas that extend out from the core. They look like the tentacles of an immense galactic octopus and are 20,000 light years long, and just 200 light years wide. They are held in place by powerful magnetic fields from the massive central black hole

Gravity Or Acceleration? Part-3 Einstein’s simple idea has big consequences. Let’s begin by considering what happens if two foolhardy people jump from opposite banks into a bottomless chasm. If we ignore air friction, then we can say that while they freely fall, they both accelerate downward at the same rate and feel no external force acting on them. They can throw a ball back and forth, always aiming it straight at each other, as if there were no gravity. The ball falls at the same rate that they do, so it always remains in a line between them. Two people play catch as they descend into a bottomless abyss. Since the people and ball all fall at the same speed, it appears to them that they can play catch by throwing the ball in a straight line between them. Within their frame of reference, there appears to be no gravity. Such a game of catch is very different on the surface of Earth. Everyone who grows up feeling gravity knows that a ball, once thrown, falls to the ground. Thus, in order to play catch with someone, you must aim the ball upward so that it follows an arc—rising and then falling as it moves forward—until it is caught at the other end. Now suppose we isolate our falling people and ball inside a large box that is falling with them. No one inside the box is aware of any gravitational force. If they let go of the ball, it doesn’t fall to the bottom of the box or anywhere else but merely stays there or moves in a straight line, depending on whether it is given any motion. Astronauts in the International Space Station (ISS) that is orbiting Earth live in an environment just like that of the people sealed in a freely falling box . The orbiting ISS is actually “falling” freely around Earth. While in free fall, the astronauts live in a strange world where there seems to be no gravitational force. One can give a wrench a shove, and it moves at constant speed across the orbiting laboratory. A pencil set in midair remains there as if no force were acting on it. In the “weightless” environment of the International Space Station, moving takes very little effort. Appearances are misleading, however. There is a force in this situation. Both the ISS and the astronauts continually fall around Earth, pulled by its gravity. But since all fall together—shuttle, astronauts, wrench, and pencil—inside the ISS all gravitational forces appear to be absent. Thus, the orbiting ISS provides an excellent example of the principle of equivalence—how local effects of gravity can be completely compensated by the right acceleration. To the astronauts, falling around Earth creates the same effects as being far off in space, remote from all gravitational influences.