Skip to main content

WHY EARTH SPINS?

 

  •         Earth is rotating on its axis about 1673 km/h.
  •         Why do earth spin? is an age old question. Not only earth , everything in the universe spin.
  •         And the common answer for such questions is inertia – the ability to resist change in motion.
  •         But now, let's think deep into it.
  •        To answer this we have to go to the beginning, about 4.5billion years ago.
  •         In our old blog Nebula, we saw how the stars are formed.
  •         4.5 billion years ago our solar system was formed from a nebula.
  •          In that nebula as usual when hydrogen and helium atoms contracted and expanded, the nebula stated to rotate with an angular momentum. As the process goes on also, the direction of spin didn’t change.
  •         After sometimes sun, planets, asteroids are formed out of the nebula.
  •         To conserve the angular momentum, all the objects formed from the nebula had spin.
  •         The angular momentum of the plants are not constant, it is decreasing.  After some millions of years, one day will have less than 24 hours.
  •         Almost all the planets spin in anticlockwise direction, but Venus is an exemption.
  •         Venus spin in clockwise direction. It may be because some object may hit it and its spin axis direction may changed. Or its spin angular momentum would have became zero and started to spin in opposite direction.
  •        Uranus also have clockwise spin, because it was knocked on its side.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BLACK BODY RADIATION

         As we already saw in our blog ‘How do we see colors’, “It’s the material, Not the color! – how do we see color?”, black body is an ideal object.          Black body is an object that can absorbs all frequencies of radiation.          Due to this the object get heated up and when its temperature equals to the surrounding temperature, the object starts to radiate energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation .         Depending upon the temperature of the body the intensity of the radiation of different frequency varies.          Almost all the object behave like an black body (but not like an ideal one), example: sun, human body, hot objects …          In 18 th century when scientist thought that they found almost everything in the field of physics, black body concept came as a challenge in front of them.        ...

Top 10 Indian Physicists

  Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas  - Roger Penrose 1.  Sir C.V. Raman (1888-1970)   Alma matter : Presidency college, University of Madras. Research field : Optics and acoustics Awards received: Nobel Prize, Bharat Ratna, Lenin Peace Prize, Fellow of Royal Society. He is known for his prominent work in scattering which led to the discovery of Raman effect. 2.  Satyendranath Bose (1894-1974) Alma matter : Presidency college, Calcutta. Research field : Quantum Mechanics Awards received: Padma Vibhushan, Fellow of Royal Society He is known for the invention of boson and Bose-Einstein condensate. 3.  Meghnad Saha (1893-1956) Alma matter : Presidency college, Calcutta and Rajabazar Science College. Research field : Quantum and Statistical Mechanics, astrophysics. Awards received: Fellow of Royal Society He is known for developing Saha ionization equation. 4.  Homi J. Bhabha (1909-1966) Alma matter : University of Cambridge...

STAR FORMATION

The birth and death of various stars occurs every second in the universe. In our previous blog we saw about “Nebula -the nursery of stars”. Stars are the building blocks of the galaxies. So now let’s see how stars comes into existence from the nebulae. The nebula is made of 99% hydrogen . After nebula formation the interstellar materials starts to cool . Due to this, atom, ions and particles comes together (formation of clumps) and compression occurs. Owing to this the nebulae contracts and splits into separate clumps of different masses. Each clump will try to evolve as an individual star. Since the density of clumps is high the temperature will eventually increase. Because of it’s high mass gravitational force starts to play it’s role. This clump will undergo further contraction. Eventually the temperature and density of the clumps will increase and thus they are recognized as a protostar having a developed photosphere. In case if the mass of the clumps is too small, then it wi...