Shoot for the Moon: Its Surface Contains a Pot of Gold - leapsmag. Star Size Comparison HD. Cosmology (Winter, 2013) 1 The expanding (Newtonian) universe Professor Susskind introduces the topic of modern Cosmology, which started with the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. However, this lecture focuses on the classical or Newtonian view of the universe. Beginning with the... [more] 2 Matter and radiation dominated universes After reviewing the basic equation for an expanding universe, Professor Susskind solves the equation explicitly for a zero energy universe, and then extends the derivation to universes with non-zero energy. These universes can take two forms:... [more] 3 Geometries of space: flat, spherical, hyperbolic Professor Susskind presents three possible geometries of homogeneous space: flat (infinite), spherical (positively curved and finite), hyperbolic (negatively curved and infinite).
He develops the metric for these three spatial geometries in... Why is it Dark at Night? Multimedia - Video Gallery.
PlanetQuest - The Search for Another Earth. The flower you see in this animation isn’t NASA’s attempt to celebrate the coming of spring. It’s actually the latest design in a cutting-edge effort to take pictures of planets orbiting stars far from the sun. Astronomers have been indirectly detecting exoplanets for more than 15 years, but actually taking a picture of one has proven an immensely difficult task. Picking out the dim light of a planet from a star billions of times brighter is akin to finding a needle in a cosmic haystack, especially when the planet in question is a small, rocky world similar to Earth. In order to achieve this feat, researchers are developing techniques to block out the starlight while preserving the light emitted by the planet. This is called starlight suppression. It’s a task that NASA’s flower-shaped starshade is designed to make easier.
With the starlight suppressed, light coming from exoplanets orbiting the star would be visible. By Joshua Rodriguez.