Astrophysicist

Let’s suppose that you get into your spaceship and point it straight towards the million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our galaxy. (Actually, there’s some debate about whether our galaxy contains a central black hole, but let‘s assume it does for the moment.) Starting from a long way away from the black hole, you just turn off your rockets and Coast in. What happens? At first, you don't feel any gravitational forces at all. Since you're in free fall. every part of your body and your spaceship is being pulled in the same way, and so you feel weightless. (This is exactly the same thing that happens to astronauts in Earth orbit: even though both astronauts and space shuttle are being pulled by the Earth's gravity, they don't feel any gravitational force because everything is being pulled in exactly the same way.) As you get closer and closer to the center of the hole, though. you start to feel "tidal' gravitational forces. Imagine that your feet are

The year was 1665. Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini turned his telescope to the planet Jupiter and made an amazing discovery a large “permanent” spot in the southern hemisphere of the giant planet. Cassini and his successors observed the permanent spot regularly until 1712. Only sporadic observations occurred for the next 165 years, but the Great red spot has been systematically observed since 1878.  Despite the been large gap in the record, many astronomers think that the Great Red Spot has existed for more than 340 years, longer than the United States  has been a country. Nevertheless, the Great Red Spot’s definitive existence for the past 130 years makes it the Solar System’s longest-lived storm, Not only is the Great Red Spot long-lived, it is also immense and intense. Approximately three Earths would fit inside Jupiter’s massive storm system. The Great Red Spot towers 8 km (5 miles) over the surrounding cloud tops, nearly the height of Mount Everest. The giant whirlpool is

In 1932, the neutron was discovered. As mentioned above, two years later, Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky at the California Institute of Technology hypothesized stars consisting essentially of neutrons. The idea was that if one compresses a star to a density of 10^14 g cm^-3-the density of the nuclei of atoms we are familiar with then the repulsive force between the neutrons. practically touching one another. would prevent any further compression, and the star will be stable. It is just like packing a football with ball bearings; when the ball is jam-packed. it will be quite incompressible. This hypothesis led physicists to the conclusion that even stars more massive than 1.4M ☉   could find ultimate peace. not as white dwarfs but as neutron stars. A density of 10^14 g cm^-3 implies that such stars would be incredibly small, with a radius of mere 10 kilometres! So it appeared that all stars will find peace after all, either as white dwarfs or neutron stars, but this turned out to