I recently saw a documentary on
How Universe Works on Netflix and I am completely baffled at the amount of interest that it has drawn me to the science of Astrophysics and the the outer world of cosmology.
This all started when I first heard the news of this couple of days back ,
SuperNova exploded in one of our Nearby Galaxies known as the M82
Even though I knew the terms Supernova, nebulae , galaxy et all. I wasn't sure what the definitions meant in utmost clarity. Neither I was sure what I was supposed to be looking at. The best part of the supernova explosion is, it is defined by Chandrasekhar limit (the maximum mass of a white dwarf star which if exceeded collapses into a black hole) based on the Nobel prize winner Subramanyam Chandrasekhar who is one of the greatest astrophysicist of Indian origin. I don't know why but I suddenly felt very proud of this.
It took me to a flashback of all the things I did, when I was a kid. When we used to go to our native place I always used to sleep on a "cot" that was arranged outside the house directly under the Night sky. Looking up at the sky,grabbing my bed sheet and counting stars while sleeping was the most pleasant experience I ever had and is one of my most treasured memories as a kid.
Unfortunately, all this vanished away as I participated in a Rat- Race of being an engineer "Kuch banke dikaho" otherwise you are doomed kind of lifestyle. However I did have some inclination of Astronomy all the time. Now since the rat race is kinda over, it was time to pursue some education and bring back the memories lived.
So here it starts: I will paint a picture for all of us to visualize ( BTW I am no expert but would love to look in this bullet points as a layman and try to generate interest of some of us and bring those memories back.) I am sure everyone can get the answers on Wikipedia but this is something i would like to share w/o being too over educating.
Earth is a part of Solar system and our Solar system is part of Galaxy called as a the Milky Way. In the universe there are tons of galaxies and they are all linked to each other by filaments. Some of stunning pictures of our Milky Way are on the internet. Here is one of them :
The galaxies are mostly spiral in nature because they are acted by a force in the center known as the dark matter. Dark Matter is causing the floating stars to converge and are binded to the center of the galaxy. Our Galaxy is 10,000 light years in diameter. The nearest spiral galaxy to the milky way is Andromeda which is 2.5 million light years away.
Andromeda and the Milky way are currently on a collision course and there are predicted to fuse in one single galaxy in 2.5 billion light years. So Milky way would cease to exist at that point and what happens to Earth is unknown. Just to give an idea dinosaurs used to exist on Earth 231.4 million years ago and here we are talking in terms of light years as well.
In the mean time, our Earth's core is cooling down as well. As a result of this the Earth's magnetic field will cease to protect us from the Sun's solar winds (Which is why we see the beautiful Aurora's ) and cause all the water to dry up eventually killing all the life form on earth. It is assumed that this is what happened to Mars.
Actually, many of the scientists say that we are living is the most golden era ( which lasts for a couple billion years in the life of a galaxy) that so many co-incidences took place to create the most perfect environment for our survival. Truly, the Universe is amazing and after getting all this info I feel puny in terms of broader scheme of things and that trivial things becomes non existent.
Purpose of this thread : To re-kindle the interest of people like to me to start star gazing and put it in layman's term so that everyone understands it and to put up new views and ideas about Astrophysics and theoretical Astrophysics.
There is so much info out there and not enough time..