Heena Sharma Blog

Our senses are stuck in the past . There’s a flash of lightning, and then seconds pass until we hear the rumble of distant thunder. We hear the past. We are seeing into the past too . While sound travels about a kilometre every three seconds, light travels 300,000 kilometres every second. When we see a flash of lighting three kilometres away, we are seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago. That’s not exactly the distant past. But as we look further afield, we can peer further back. We can see seconds, minutes, hours and years into the past with our own eyes. Looking through a telescope, we can look even further into the past. A second back in time If you really want to look back in time, you need to look up. The Moon is our nearest celestial neighbour - a world with valleys, mountains and craters. Read More Business Standard

The Milky Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that took place sometime in the past 300-900 million years and set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond, scientists say. The European Space Agency (ESA)'s star mapping mission, Gaia, discovered the pattern of movement in stars in the Milky Way disc -- one of the major components of our galaxy. The pattern was revealed because Gaia not only accurately measures the positions of more than a billion stars but also precisely measures their velocities on the plane of the sky. For a subset of a few million stars, Gaia provided an estimate of the full three-dimensional velocities, allowing a study of stellar motion using the combination of position and velocity, which is known as 'phase space'. Read Complete Article Article Source >> Business Standard