The Radio Astronomy Club, BITS Pilani

17/01/2020

We were delighted to meet Dr. Bala Iyer, Chairman LIGO India, ICTS-TIFR, who came to BITS Pilani.
His talk "Detection of Gravitational Waves and the Dawn of the associated Multi-Messenger Astronomy" was highly enriching.

13/01/2020

Intrested first or second yearites can fill this form.
https://bit.ly/2tTdLZZ

Know more about our projects here.
https://bit.ly/2RgNBs2

12/08/2019

Recently one of our seniors, Ujjwal Panda, started a blog: Research Student Diaries. With articles spanning all disciplines, from physics and astronomy to chemistry and biology, the blog also discusses his own personal experiences with research, starting from how he and other students from BITS Pilani built a radio telescope, NASA Radio Jove, to observe radio storms on Jupiter. The telescope will soon start observations this semester. Many of his articles also focus on his recent foray in Pulsar Astronomy.

The article covering his experiences with building NASA Radio Jove:

Building a Radio Telescope in BITS Pilani (https://wp.me/p9XnKB-J)

Some of his articles on Pulsar Astronomy:

Where do Pulsar go when they die? (https://wp.me/p9XnKB-13)

Looking for the "Zombie" Pulsars (https://wp.me/p9XnKB-1L)

The Shivering Universe (https://wp.me/p9XnKB-43)

Read, like, comment and share! The link is given below.

https://researchstudentdiaries.wordpress.com/

My thoughts on research and science

22/10/2018

Newfound World, "The Goblin," May Lead to Mysterious Planet Nine

Goblin is a nickname given to 2015 TG387, a newfound object in the far outer solar system, way beyond Pluto. The orbit of 2015 TG387 shares peculiarities with those of other extremely farflung bodies, which appear to have been shaped by the gravity of a very large object in that distant, frigid realm—the hypothesized Planet Nine, also known as Planet X.
Scientist put the odds of having an actual planet nine around 85 percent. But simulations indicate that something massive is out there, whether it is a planet or not remains to be seen. Furthermore the fact that it has remained undetected is not surprising as at 1000 au (estimated distance of planet from sun) something even as big as Neptune would be fainter than most telescopes could see. For an estimate, average distance of sun from Earth is 1 au.

18/10/2018

A dark matter halo is a theoretical component of a galaxy that envelops the galactic disc and extends well beyond the edge of the visible galaxy. The halo's mass dominates the total mass. Thought to consist of dark matter, halos have not been observed directly. Their existence is inferred through their effects on the motions of stars and gas in galaxies. Dark matter halos play a key role in current models of galaxy formation and evolution. The dark matter halo is not fully explained by the presence of massive compact halo objects

A galaxy was found by astronomers using the delightful Dragonfly Telescope Array, NGC 1052-DF2 appears to have none. Or at best, about as much dark matter as normal matter. And that just doesn't make sense. Where did the dark matter go? It's not clear. A better question might be, did this galaxy have a dark matter halo in the first place? Perhaps it formed from gas stripped out of NGC 1052, the nearby elliptical galaxy. That can happen when two biggish galaxies collide… or the gas could have been blown out by the gigantic supermassive black hole we know sits in the center of NGC 1052. Or maybe it was gas falling into NGC 1052 that fragmented and formed stars before it could complete its descent into the bigger galaxy.

10/08/2018

First detection of fast radio bursts between 400 and 800 Mhz by CHIME

Astronomers have detected yet another mysterious and powerful fast radio burst hitting Earth from an unknown source in space.

27/07/2018

Tonight is the pinnacle of the current Mars apparition when it arrives at opposition to the sun and its closest point to the Earth.

Mars will arrive at opposition to the sun — when it will rise at sunset, reach its highest point in the sky during the middle of the night and set at sunrise.

As for other planets, not even Mars' exceptional brilliance can outdo Venus, shining like a sequined showgirl low in the western twilight sky. And well to Venus' lower right, you might even get a glimpse early in the month of Mercury. Jupiter shines brilliantly in the south as darkness falls, while bright Saturn glimmers low in the southeast at dusk fades.

22/07/2018

What is the most disappointing physics experiment in history? This question was originally answered on Quora by Kurt Van den Broeck.

17/07/2018

Georges Lemaître was an astronomer and professor of physics who is thought to be the first to have theorised that the universe is expanding.

His theory was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble in what is now known as Hubble’s Law.

Lemaître is also credited with proposing what has now become known as the Big Bang theory – which says that the observable universe began with an explosion of a single particle.

The Radio Astronomy Club remembers this great visionary on the occasion of his birthday anniversary.

16/07/2018

For the first time, scientists have found the source of a high-energy ghostly