A mysterious strong narrowband signal was received on August 15, 1977, by Big Ear Radio telescope in the United States, Ohio State University. The signal was recognized to have come from the constellation Sagittarius and had the hallmarks of coming from an extraterrestrial origin.Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the anomaly a few days later when he was reviewing the recorded data. The signal lasted for 72 seconds. He was excited by the result, circled the readings on the printout and wrote Wow! on its side. This is how the signal from constellation Sagittarius got its name of Wow!The Wow! signal is ... Read More

By default, a hole will be dug downwards. It does not matter whether you are in the north pole or south pole or anywhere on the earth geographically, you dig a hole only downwards. So you will be going down.

An Eclipse is formed when a celestial body is obscured by another. We know that eclipses occur when sun, moon, and earth align in a straight line. The Solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes in between the sun and the earth. The Lunar eclipse is formed when the earth blocks the way for the sunlight to reach the moon.Penumbra and AntumbraThe umbra is the innermost and darkest part of the shadow, which is the area when an observer can experience the eclipse completely. The Penumbra is the area in which only a portion of the light is obscured by ... Read More

In the vast space around us, there are numerous galaxies present, which are known as large groups filled with stars, dust, and gases all held together due to gravity. All the galaxies are likely to contain stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, black holes, nebulae, dust, neutron stars etc.Just like our solar system that lies in the Milky Way galaxy, there are many galaxies in the space. Every galaxy moves at certain speed and exists in a certain shape. Our milky way galaxy is in the spiral shape with a bright bulge at its center.The famous astronomer Edwin Hubble studied the ... Read More

Though Australia gives you a feel that continent and Island could be the same, there are not. An Island is a continental-land that is surrounded by water on all its sides. There are different names depending upon the size of this land and the water body surrounds it. A continent is a large land mass that has specified geographical boundaries and separated by oceans.IslandAn Island is a large piece of sub-continental land which is surrounded by water on all sides. Very small islands formed on emerged lands or atolls are called Islets or Skerries. An island formed in a river ... Read More

An earthquake is defined as the sudden shaking of the Earth's surface. Earthquakes are caused by the collision of tectonic plates in the Earth's crust. These plates ride over each other when instability is created in the crust due to the release of energy from the Earth's core.There are large earthquakes and small earthquakes. Earthquakes are measured using an instrument called Seismometer. The magnitude of an earthquake is represented on the Richter scale. On the scale, 3 or less is scarcely noticeable, and magnitude 7 or more causes damage over a wide area.The Great Chilean earthquake also known as the ... Read More

Earth rotates around its own axis which is tilted at 23.5 degrees, from the plane of its orbit around the sun, in the eastward direction. It takes almost 24 hours to complete one rotation. The Earth rotates at a speed of 460 m/s, that is approximately 1650 km/hr at the equator. The angular velocity of the Earth decreases as we keep moving toward the poles.The Earth's rotational speed is slowing down with time. According to atomic clocks, the present day is 1.7 milliseconds slower than a century ago. It is not a big issue as it will take more than ... Read More

Space is an empty void. It is not totally vacant, but rather comprises of a vacuum containing a very low thickness of particles, overwhelmingly a plasma of hydrogen and helium. It also consists of neutrinos, cosmic and electromagnetic rays. One hydrogen per cubic meter is the density of space.There is nothing in between galaxies and the temperature literally reaches 2.7 K, which is −270.45 °C. In the galaxies, 90% of the mass is in an unknown form, called dark matter. It interacts with other matter through the gravitational but not electromagnetic force.Manned spaceflight is limited to the lower Earth orbit ... Read More

A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust made of hydrogen, helium and other ionized gasses. Initially, it was a name given for any diffuse cosmic object, including galaxies past the Milky Way.Most nebulae are of the tremendous size, even a great many light years in diameter. The nebula that is scarcely noticeable to the human eye from Earth would seem bigger, yet not brighter, when near it. The Orion Nebula, the brightest cloud in the sky that involves an area double the diameter of the full Moon, can be seen with the exposed eye yet was missed by early ... Read More

Yes. Black holes do exist in the Universe. Recently NASA scientists using their instruments have painted the pictures of these strange and fascinating objects in space. These black holes are formed because a big star collapses into itself creating a very high gravity due to massive mass squeezed into a tiny space.Imagine a star of mass ten times more than of Sun squeezed into a sphere of the size of the moon. The gravity will be very strong because of dense matter in tiny space. This usually happens when the star is dying. The resultant gravitational pull will be so ... Read More