1.
Physical cosmology
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Physical cosmology is the study of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the Universe and is concerned with fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. These advances made it possible to speculate about the origin of the universe, a few researchers still advocate a handful of alternative cosmologies, however, most cosmologists agree that the Big Bang theory explains the observations better. Cosmology draws heavily on the work of many areas of research in theoretical. Areas relevant to include particle physics experiments and theory, theoretical and observational astrophysics, general relativity, quantum mechanics. Modern cosmology developed along tandem tracks of theory and observation, in 1916, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time. At the time, Einstein believed in a universe. This is because masses distributed throughout the universe gravitationally attract, however, he realized that his equations permitted the introduction of a constant term which could counteract the attractive force of gravity on the cosmic scale. Einstein published his first paper on relativistic cosmology in 1917, in which he added this cosmological constant to his equations in order to force them to model a static universe. However, this so-called Einstein model is unstable to small perturbations—it will eventually start to expand or contract, the Einstein model describes a static universe, space is finite and unbounded. It was later realized that Einsteins model was just one of a set of possibilities, all of which were consistent with general relativity. The cosmological solutions of general relativity were found by Alexander Friedmann in the early 1920s and his equations describe the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker universe, which may expand or contract, and whose geometry may be open, flat, or closed. In the 1910s, Vesto Slipher interpreted the red shift of spiral nebulae as a Doppler shift that indicated they were receding from Earth, however, it is difficult to determine the distance to astronomical objects. One way is to compare the size of an object to its angular size. Another method is to measure the brightness of an object and assume an intrinsic luminosity, due to the difficulty of using these methods, they did not realize that the nebulae were actually galaxies outside our own Milky Way, nor did they speculate about the cosmological implications. In 1929, Edwin Hubble provided a basis for Lemaîtres theory. Hubble showed that the nebulae were galaxies by determining their distances using measurements of the brightness of Cepheid variable stars. He discovered a relationship between the redshift of a galaxy and its distance and he interpreted this as evidence that the galaxies are receding from Earth in every direction at speeds proportional to their distance. Given the cosmological principle, Hubbles law suggested that the universe was expanding, two primary explanations were proposed for the expansion
2.
Astrophysics (journal)
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Astrophysics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of astrophysics published by Springer. It was first published in 1965, each volume is published every three months. The editor-in-chief is David M. Sedrakyan, the focus of this journal is astronomy and is a translation of the peer-reviewed Russian language journal Astrofizika. Astrophysics is indexed in the databases, List of astronomy journals publishers information on the journal
3.
Astronomy
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Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It applies mathematics, physics, and chemistry, in an effort to explain the origin of those objects and phenomena and their evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and comets, while the phenomena include supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, more generally, all astronomical phenomena that originate outside Earths atmosphere are within the purview of astronomy. A related but distinct subject, physical cosmology, is concerned with the study of the Universe as a whole, Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history, such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Nubians, Iranians, Chinese, during the 20th century, the field of professional astronomy split into observational and theoretical branches. Observational astronomy is focused on acquiring data from observations of astronomical objects, theoretical astronomy is oriented toward the development of computer or analytical models to describe astronomical objects and phenomena. The two fields complement each other, with theoretical astronomy seeking to explain the results and observations being used to confirm theoretical results. Astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs can play an active role, especially in the discovery. Amateur astronomers have made and contributed to many important astronomical discoveries, Astronomy means law of the stars. Astronomy should not be confused with astrology, the system which claims that human affairs are correlated with the positions of celestial objects. Although the two share a common origin, they are now entirely distinct. Generally, either the term astronomy or astrophysics may be used to refer to this subject, however, since most modern astronomical research deals with subjects related to physics, modern astronomy could actually be called astrophysics. Few fields, such as astrometry, are purely astronomy rather than also astrophysics, some titles of the leading scientific journals in this field includeThe Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy and Astrophysics. In early times, astronomy only comprised the observation and predictions of the motions of objects visible to the naked eye, in some locations, early cultures assembled massive artifacts that possibly had some astronomical purpose. Before tools such as the telescope were invented, early study of the stars was conducted using the naked eye, most of early astronomy actually consisted of mapping the positions of the stars and planets, a science now referred to as astrometry. From these observations, early ideas about the motions of the planets were formed, and the nature of the Sun, Moon, the Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe with the Sun, the Moon and the stars rotating around it. This is known as the model of the Universe, or the Ptolemaic system. The Babylonians discovered that lunar eclipses recurred in a cycle known as a saros
4.
Chemistry
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Chemistry is a branch of physical science that studies the composition, structure, properties and change of matter. Chemistry is sometimes called the science because it bridges other natural sciences, including physics. For the differences between chemistry and physics see comparison of chemistry and physics, the history of chemistry can be traced to alchemy, which had been practiced for several millennia in various parts of the world. The word chemistry comes from alchemy, which referred to a set of practices that encompassed elements of chemistry, metallurgy, philosophy, astrology, astronomy, mysticism. An alchemist was called a chemist in popular speech, and later the suffix -ry was added to this to describe the art of the chemist as chemistry, the modern word alchemy in turn is derived from the Arabic word al-kīmīā. In origin, the term is borrowed from the Greek χημία or χημεία and this may have Egyptian origins since al-kīmīā is derived from the Greek χημία, which is in turn derived from the word Chemi or Kimi, which is the ancient name of Egypt in Egyptian. Alternately, al-kīmīā may derive from χημεία, meaning cast together, in retrospect, the definition of chemistry has changed over time, as new discoveries and theories add to the functionality of the science. The term chymistry, in the view of noted scientist Robert Boyle in 1661, in 1837, Jean-Baptiste Dumas considered the word chemistry to refer to the science concerned with the laws and effects of molecular forces. More recently, in 1998, Professor Raymond Chang broadened the definition of chemistry to mean the study of matter, early civilizations, such as the Egyptians Babylonians, Indians amassed practical knowledge concerning the arts of metallurgy, pottery and dyes, but didnt develop a systematic theory. Greek atomism dates back to 440 BC, arising in works by such as Democritus and Epicurus. In 50 BC, the Roman philosopher Lucretius expanded upon the theory in his book De rerum natura, unlike modern concepts of science, Greek atomism was purely philosophical in nature, with little concern for empirical observations and no concern for chemical experiments. Work, particularly the development of distillation, continued in the early Byzantine period with the most famous practitioner being the 4th century Greek-Egyptian Zosimos of Panopolis. He formulated Boyles law, rejected the four elements and proposed a mechanistic alternative of atoms. Before his work, though, many important discoveries had been made, the Scottish chemist Joseph Black and the Dutchman J. B. English scientist John Dalton proposed the theory of atoms, that all substances are composed of indivisible atoms of matter. Davy discovered nine new elements including the alkali metals by extracting them from their oxides with electric current, british William Prout first proposed ordering all the elements by their atomic weight as all atoms had a weight that was an exact multiple of the atomic weight of hydrogen. The inert gases, later called the noble gases were discovered by William Ramsay in collaboration with Lord Rayleigh at the end of the century, thereby filling in the basic structure of the table. Organic chemistry was developed by Justus von Liebig and others, following Friedrich Wöhlers synthesis of urea which proved that organisms were, in theory
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Astronomical object
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An astronomical object or celestial object is a naturally occurring physical entity, association, or structure that current astronomy has demonstrated to exist in the observable universe. In astronomy, the object and body are often used interchangeably. Examples for astronomical objects include planetary systems, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies, while asteroids, moons, planets, and stars are astronomical bodies. A comet may be identified as both body and object, It is a body when referring to the nucleus of ice and dust. The universe can be viewed as having a hierarchical structure, at the largest scales, the fundamental component of assembly is the galaxy. Galaxies are organized groups and clusters, often within larger superclusters. Disc galaxies encompass lenticular and spiral galaxies with features, such as spiral arms, at the core, most galaxies have a supermassive black hole, which may result in an active galactic nucleus. Galaxies can also have satellites in the form of dwarf galaxies, the constituents of a galaxy are formed out of gaseous matter that assembles through gravitational self-attraction in a hierarchical manner. At this level, the fundamental components are the stars. The great variety of forms are determined almost entirely by the mass, composition. Stars may be found in systems that orbit about each other in a hierarchical organization. A planetary system and various objects such as asteroids, comets and debris. The various distinctive types of stars are shown by the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram —a plot of stellar luminosity versus surface temperature. Each star follows a track across this diagram. If this track takes the star through a region containing a variable type. An example of this is the instability strip, a region of the H-R diagram that includes Delta Scuti, RR Lyrae, the table below lists the general categories of bodies and objects by their location or structure. International Astronomical Naming Commission List of light sources List of Solar System objects Lists of astronomical objects SkyChart, Sky & Telescope Monthly skymaps for every location on Earth
6.
Sun
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The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99. 86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three quarters of the Suns mass consists of hydrogen, the rest is mostly helium, with smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon. The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star based on its spectral class and it formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into a disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core and it is thought that almost all stars form by this process. The Sun is roughly middle-aged, it has not changed dramatically for more than four billion years and it is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large enough to engulf the current orbits of Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. The enormous effect of the Sun on Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, the synodic rotation of Earth and its orbit around the Sun are the basis of the solar calendar, which is the predominant calendar in use today. The English proper name Sun developed from Old English sunne and may be related to south, all Germanic terms for the Sun stem from Proto-Germanic *sunnōn. The English weekday name Sunday stems from Old English and is ultimately a result of a Germanic interpretation of Latin dies solis, the Latin name for the Sun, Sol, is not common in general English language use, the adjectival form is the related word solar. The term sol is used by planetary astronomers to refer to the duration of a solar day on another planet. A mean Earth solar day is approximately 24 hours, whereas a mean Martian sol is 24 hours,39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. From at least the 4th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, the Sun was worshipped as the god Ra, portrayed as a falcon-headed divinity surmounted by the solar disk, and surrounded by a serpent. In the New Empire period, the Sun became identified with the dung beetle, in the form of the Sun disc Aten, the Sun had a brief resurgence during the Amarna Period when it again became the preeminent, if not only, divinity for the Pharaoh Akhenaton. The Sun is viewed as a goddess in Germanic paganism, Sól/Sunna, in ancient Roman culture, Sunday was the day of the Sun god. It was adopted as the Sabbath day by Christians who did not have a Jewish background, the symbol of light was a pagan device adopted by Christians, and perhaps the most important one that did not come from Jewish traditions
7.
Star
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A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. However, most of the stars in the Universe, including all stars outside our galaxy, indeed, most are invisible from Earth even through the most powerful telescopes. Almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the stars lifetime, near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity, and many properties of a star by observing its motion through space, its luminosity. The total mass of a star is the factor that determines its evolution. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the environment affects its rotation. A plot of the temperature of stars against their luminosities produces a plot known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. Plotting a particular star on that allows the age and evolutionary state of that star to be determined. A stars life begins with the collapse of a gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium. When the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily converted into helium through nuclear fusion, the remainder of the stars interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The stars internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity, a star with mass greater than 0.4 times the Suns will expand to become a red giant when the hydrogen fuel in its core is exhausted. In some cases, it will fuse heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core, as the star expands it throws a part of its mass, enriched with those heavier elements, into the interstellar environment, to be recycled later as new stars. Meanwhile, the core becomes a remnant, a white dwarf. Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are bound and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a close orbit, their gravitational interaction can have a significant impact on their evolution. Stars can form part of a much larger gravitationally bound structure, historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world
8.
Galaxy
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A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias, literally milky, Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion stars to giants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxys center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their morphology as elliptical, spiral. Many galaxies are thought to have holes at their active centers. The Milky Ways central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a four million times greater than the Sun. Recent estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range from 200 billion to 2 trillion or more, most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter and separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs. The space between galaxies is filled with a gas having an average density of less than one atom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are organized into groups, clusters. At the largest scale, these associations are generally arranged into sheets and filaments surrounded by immense voids. In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Heras breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing a baby, she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills and. In the astronomical literature, the capitalized word Galaxy is often used to refer to our galaxy, the Milky Way, to distinguish it from the other galaxies in our universe. The English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Chaucer c. 1380, See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë Which men clepeth the Milky Wey, For hit is whyt. However, the word Universe was later understood to mean the entirety of existence, so this expression fell into disuse and the objects instead became known as galaxies. Tens of thousands of galaxies have been catalogued, but only a few have well-established names, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the Sombrero Galaxy. Astronomers work with numbers from certain catalogues, such as the Messier catalogue, the NGC, the IC, the CGCG, all of the well-known galaxies appear in one or more of these catalogues but each time under a different number. For example, Messier 109 is a galaxy having the number 109 in the catalogue of Messier, but also codes NGC3992, UGC6937, CGCG 269-023, MCG +09-20-044. One of the arguments to do so is that these impressive objects deserve better than uninspired codes, for instance, Bodifee and Berger propose the informal, descriptive name Callimorphus Ursae Majoris for the well-formed barred galaxy Messier 109 in Ursa Major
9.
Exoplanet
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An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. The first scientific detection of an exoplanet was in 1988, HARPS has discovered about a hundred exoplanets while the Kepler space telescope has found more than two thousand. Kepler has also detected a few thousand candidate planets, of which about 11% may be false positives, on average, there is at least one planet per star, with a percentage having multiple planets. About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, the least massive planet known is Draugr, which is about twice the mass of the Moon. There are planets that are so near to their star that they take only a few hours to orbit, some are so far out that it is difficult to tell whether they are gravitationally bound to the star. Almost all of the planets detected so far are within the Milky Way, the nearest exoplanet is Proxima Centauri b, located 4.2 light-years from Earth and orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The discovery of exoplanets has intensified interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, there is special interest in planets that orbit in a stars habitable zone, where it is possible for liquid water, a prerequisite for life on Earth, to exist on the surface. The study of planetary habitability also considers a range of other factors in determining the suitability of a planet for hosting life. The rogue planets in the Milky Way possibly number in the billions, the convention for designating exoplanets is an extension of the system used for designating multiple-star systems as adopted by the International Astronomical Union. For exoplanets orbiting a star, the designation is normally formed by taking the name or, more commonly, designation of its parent star. The first planet discovered in a system is given the designation b, if several planets in the same system are discovered at the same time, the closest one to the star gets the next letter, followed by the other planets in order of orbital size. A provisional IAU-sanctioned standard exists to accommodate the designation of circumbinary planets, a limited number of exoplanets have IAU-sanctioned proper names. Various detection claims made in the century were rejected by astronomers. The first scientific detection of an exoplanet began in 1988, However, the first confirmed detection came in 1992, with the discovery of several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. The first confirmation of an exoplanet orbiting a star was made in 1995. Some exoplanets have been imaged directly by telescopes, but the vast majority have been detected through indirect methods, such as the transit method, in the eighteenth century the same possibility was mentioned by Isaac Newton in the General Scholium that concludes his Principia. Claims of exoplanet detections have been made since the nineteenth century, some of the earliest involve the binary star 70 Ophiuchi. In 1855 William Stephen Jacob at the East India Companys Madras Observatory reported that orbital anomalies made it highly probable that there was a body in this system
10.
Interstellar medium
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In astronomy, the interstellar medium is the matter that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, as well as dust and it fills interstellar space and blends smoothly into the surrounding intergalactic space. The energy that occupies the same volume, in the form of radiation, is the interstellar radiation field. The interstellar medium is composed of phases, distinguished by whether matter is ionic, atomic, or molecular. The interstellar medium is composed primarily of hydrogen followed by helium with trace amounts of carbon, oxygen, the thermal pressures of these phases are in rough equilibrium with one another. Magnetic fields and turbulent motions also provide pressure in the ISM, in all phases, the interstellar medium is extremely tenuous by terrestrial standards. In cool, dense regions of the ISM, matter is primarily in molecular form, in hot, diffuse regions of the ISM, matter is primarily ionized, and the density may be as low as 10−4 ions per cm3. Compare this with a density of roughly 1019 molecules per cm3 for air at sea level. By mass, 99% of the ISM is gas in any form, and 1% is dust. Of the gas in the ISM, by number 91% of atoms are hydrogen and 9% are helium, with 0. 1% being atoms of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, by mass this amounts to 70% hydrogen, 28% helium, and 1. 5% heavier elements. The hydrogen and helium are primarily a result of primordial nucleosynthesis, the ISM plays a crucial role in astrophysics precisely because of its intermediate role between stellar and galactic scales. Stars form within the densest regions of the ISM, molecular clouds, and replenish the ISM with matter and energy through planetary nebulae, stellar winds, and supernovae. This interplay between stars and the ISM helps determine the rate at which a galaxy depletes its gaseous content, voyager 1 reached the ISM on August 25,2012, making it the first artificial object from Earth to do so. Interstellar plasma and dust will be studied until the end in 2025. Table 1 shows a breakdown of the properties of the components of the ISM of the Milky Way, field, Goldsmith & Habing put forward the static two phase equilibrium model to explain the observed properties of the ISM. Their modeled ISM consisted of a dense phase, consisting of clouds of neutral and molecular hydrogen. McKee & Ostriker added a third phase that represented the very hot gas which had been shock heated by supernovae. These phases are the temperatures where heating and cooling can reach a stable equilibrium and their paper formed the basis for further study over the past three decades
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Cosmic microwave background
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The cosmic microwave background is the electromagnetic radiation left over from the time of recombination in Big Bang cosmology. In older literature, the CMB is also known as cosmic microwave background radiation or relic radiation. The CMB is a cosmic radiation that is fundamental to observational cosmology because it is the oldest light in the universe. With a traditional optical telescope, the space between stars and galaxies is completely dark, however, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope shows a faint background glow, almost isotropic, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the region of the radio spectrum. The discovery of CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang origin of the universe, when the universe was young, before the formation of stars and planets, it was denser, much hotter, and filled with a uniform glow from a white-hot fog of hydrogen plasma. As the universe expanded, both the plasma and the radiation filling it grew cooler, when the universe cooled enough, protons and electrons combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms. These atoms could no longer absorb the radiation, and so the universe became transparent instead of being an opaque fog. This is the source of the alternative term relic radiation, precise measurements of the CMB are critical to cosmology, since any proposed model of the universe must explain this radiation. The CMB has a black body spectrum at a temperature of 2. 72548±0.00057 K. The spectral radiance dEν/dν peaks at 160.23 GHz, in the range of frequencies. In particular, the radiance at different angles of observation in the sky contains small anisotropies, or irregularities. This is an active field of study, with scientists seeking both better data and better interpretations of the initial conditions of expansion. Although many different processes might produce the form of a black body spectrum. As a result, most cosmologists consider the Big Bang model of the universe to be the best explanation for the CMB. The high degree of uniformity throughout the universe and its faint but measured anisotropy lend strong support for the Big Bang model in general. Moreover, the fluctuations are coherent on angular scales that are larger than the apparent cosmological horizon at recombination, either such coherence is acausally fine-tuned, or cosmic inflation occurred. The cosmic microwave radiation is an emission of uniform, black body thermal energy coming from all parts of the sky
12.
Electromagnetic spectrum
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The electromagnetic spectrum is the collective term for all known frequencies and their linked wavelengths of the known photons. The electromagnetic spectrum of an object has a different meaning, and is instead the characteristic distribution of radiation emitted or absorbed by that particular object. Visible light lies toward the end, with wavelengths from 400 to 700 nanometres. The limit for long wavelengths is the size of the universe itself, until the middle of the 20th century it was believed by most physicists that this spectrum was infinite and continuous. Nearly all types of radiation can be used for spectroscopy, to study. Other technological uses are described under electromagnetic radiation, for most of history, visible light was the only known part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The ancient Greeks recognized that light traveled in straight lines and studied some of its properties, the study of light continued, and during the 16th and 17th centuries conflicting theories regarded light as either a wave or a particle. The first discovery of electromagnetic radiation other than visible light came in 1800 and he was studying the temperature of different colors by moving a thermometer through light split by a prism. He noticed that the highest temperature was beyond red and he theorized that this temperature change was due to calorific rays that were a type of light ray that could not be seen. The next year, Johann Ritter, working at the end of the spectrum. These behaved similarly to visible light rays, but were beyond them in the spectrum. They were later renamed ultraviolet radiation, during the 1860s James Maxwell developed four partial differential equations for the electromagnetic field. Two of these equations predicted the possibility of, and behavior of, analyzing the speed of these theoretical waves, Maxwell realized that they must travel at a speed that was about the known speed of light. This startling coincidence in value led Maxwell to make the inference that light itself is a type of electromagnetic wave, maxwells equations predicted an infinite number of frequencies of electromagnetic waves, all traveling at the speed of light. This was the first indication of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum. Maxwells predicted waves included waves at very low compared to infrared. Hertz found the waves and was able to infer that they traveled at the speed of light, Hertz also demonstrated that the new radiation could be both reflected and refracted by various dielectric media, in the same manner as light. For example, Hertz was able to focus the waves using a lens made of tree resin, in a later experiment, Hertz similarly produced and measured the properties of microwaves
13.
Luminosity
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In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of energy emitted by a star, galaxy, or other astronomical object per unit time. It is related to the brightness, which is the luminosity of an object in a spectral region. In SI units luminosity is measured in joules per second or watts, values for luminosity are often given in the terms of the luminosity of the Sun, which has a total power output of 7026384600000000000♠3. 846×1026 W. The symbol for solar luminosity is L⊙. Luminosity can also be given in terms of magnitude, the absolute bolometric magnitude of an object is a logarithmic measure of its total energy emission. In astronomy, luminosity is the amount of energy a body radiates per unit of time. It is most frequently measured in two forms, visual and bolometric, although luminosities at other wavelengths are increasingly being used as instruments become available to measure them, a bolometer is the instrument used to measure radiant energy over a wide band by absorption and measurement of heating. When not qualified, the term luminosity means bolometric luminosity, which is measured either in the SI units, watts, a star also radiates neutrinos, which carry off some energy, contributing to the stars total luminosity. In practice bolometric magnitudes are measured by taking measurements at certain wavelengths, a stars luminosity can be determined from two stellar characteristics, size and effective temperature. The former is represented in terms of solar radii, R⊙, while the latter is represented in kelvins. To determine a stars radius, two metrics are needed, the stars angular diameter and its distance from Earth, often calculated using parallax. However, for most stars the angular diameter or parallax, or both, are far below our ability to measure with any certainty, an alternate way to measure stellar luminosity is to measure the stars apparent brightness and distance. Because luminosity is proportional to temperature to the power, the large variation in stellar temperatures produces an even vaster variation in stellar luminosity. Because the luminosity depends on a power of the stellar mass. The most luminous stars are young stars, no more than a few million years for the most extreme. In the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, the x-axis represents temperature or spectral type while the y-axis represents luminosity or magnitude. The vast majority of stars are found along the sequence with blue Class 0 stars found at the top left of the chart while red Class M stars fall to the bottom right. Certain stars like Deneb and Betelgeuse are found above and to the right of the main sequence, blue and white supergiants are high luminosity stars somewhat cooler than the most luminous main sequence stars. A star like Deneb, for example, has a luminosity around 200,000 L⊙, a type of A2
14.
Density
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The density, or more precisely, the volumetric mass density, of a substance is its mass per unit volume. The symbol most often used for density is ρ, although the Latin letter D can also be used. Mathematically, density is defined as mass divided by volume, ρ = m V, where ρ is the density, m is the mass, and V is the volume. In some cases, density is defined as its weight per unit volume. For a pure substance the density has the numerical value as its mass concentration. Different materials usually have different densities, and density may be relevant to buoyancy, purity, osmium and iridium are the densest known elements at standard conditions for temperature and pressure but certain chemical compounds may be denser. Thus a relative density less than one means that the floats in water. The density of a material varies with temperature and pressure and this variation is typically small for solids and liquids but much greater for gases. Increasing the pressure on an object decreases the volume of the object, increasing the temperature of a substance decreases its density by increasing its volume. In most materials, heating the bottom of a results in convection of the heat from the bottom to the top. This causes it to rise relative to more dense unheated material, the reciprocal of the density of a substance is occasionally called its specific volume, a term sometimes used in thermodynamics. Density is a property in that increasing the amount of a substance does not increase its density. Archimedes knew that the irregularly shaped wreath could be crushed into a cube whose volume could be calculated easily and compared with the mass, upon this discovery, he leapt from his bath and ran naked through the streets shouting, Eureka. As a result, the term eureka entered common parlance and is used today to indicate a moment of enlightenment, the story first appeared in written form in Vitruvius books of architecture, two centuries after it supposedly took place. Some scholars have doubted the accuracy of this tale, saying among other things that the method would have required precise measurements that would have been difficult to make at the time, from the equation for density, mass density has units of mass divided by volume. As there are units of mass and volume covering many different magnitudes there are a large number of units for mass density in use. The SI unit of kilogram per metre and the cgs unit of gram per cubic centimetre are probably the most commonly used units for density.1,000 kg/m3 equals 1 g/cm3. In industry, other larger or smaller units of mass and or volume are often more practical, see below for a list of some of the most common units of density
15.
Temperature
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A temperature is an objective comparative measurement of hot or cold. It is measured by a thermometer, several scales and units exist for measuring temperature, the most common being Celsius, Fahrenheit, and, especially in science, Kelvin. Absolute zero is denoted as 0 K on the Kelvin scale, −273.15 °C on the Celsius scale, the kinetic theory offers a valuable but limited account of the behavior of the materials of macroscopic bodies, especially of fluids. Temperature is important in all fields of science including physics, geology, chemistry, atmospheric sciences, medicine. The Celsius scale is used for temperature measurements in most of the world. Because of the 100 degree interval, it is called a centigrade scale.15, the United States commonly uses the Fahrenheit scale, on which water freezes at 32°F and boils at 212°F at sea-level atmospheric pressure. Many scientific measurements use the Kelvin temperature scale, named in honor of the Scottish physicist who first defined it and it is a thermodynamic or absolute temperature scale. Its zero point, 0K, is defined to coincide with the coldest physically-possible temperature and its degrees are defined through thermodynamics. The temperature of zero occurs at 0K = −273. 15°C. For historical reasons, the triple point temperature of water is fixed at 273.16 units of the measurement increment, Temperature is one of the principal quantities in the study of thermodynamics. There is a variety of kinds of temperature scale and it may be convenient to classify them as empirically and theoretically based. Empirical temperature scales are historically older, while theoretically based scales arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, empirically based temperature scales rely directly on measurements of simple physical properties of materials. For example, the length of a column of mercury, confined in a capillary tube, is dependent largely on temperature. Such scales are only within convenient ranges of temperature. For example, above the point of mercury, a mercury-in-glass thermometer is impracticable. A material is of no use as a thermometer near one of its phase-change temperatures, in spite of these restrictions, most generally used practical thermometers are of the empirically based kind. Especially, it was used for calorimetry, which contributed greatly to the discovery of thermodynamics, nevertheless, empirical thermometry has serious drawbacks when judged as a basis for theoretical physics. Theoretically based temperature scales are based directly on theoretical arguments, especially those of thermodynamics, kinetic theory and they rely on theoretical properties of idealized devices and materials
16.
Mechanics
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Mechanics is an area of science concerned with the behaviour of physical bodies when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent effects of the bodies on their environment. The scientific discipline has its origins in Ancient Greece with the writings of Aristotle, during the early modern period, scientists such as Khayaam, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics. It is a branch of physics that deals with particles that are either at rest or are moving with velocities significantly less than the speed of light. It can also be defined as a branch of science which deals with the motion of, historically, classical mechanics came first, while quantum mechanics is a comparatively recent invention. Classical mechanics originated with Isaac Newtons laws of motion in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, both are commonly held to constitute the most certain knowledge that exists about physical nature. Classical mechanics has especially often been viewed as a model for other so-called exact sciences, essential in this respect is the relentless use of mathematics in theories, as well as the decisive role played by experiment in generating and testing them. Quantum mechanics is of a scope, as it encompasses classical mechanics as a sub-discipline which applies under certain restricted circumstances. According to the principle, there is no contradiction or conflict between the two subjects, each simply pertains to specific situations. The correspondence principle states that the behavior of systems described by quantum theories reproduces classical physics in the limit of quantum numbers. Quantum mechanics has superseded classical mechanics at the level and is indispensable for the explanation and prediction of processes at the molecular, atomic. However, for macroscopic processes classical mechanics is able to solve problems which are difficult in quantum mechanics and hence remains useful. Modern descriptions of such behavior begin with a definition of such quantities as displacement, time, velocity, acceleration, mass. Until about 400 years ago, however, motion was explained from a different point of view. He showed that the speed of falling objects increases steadily during the time of their fall and this acceleration is the same for heavy objects as for light ones, provided air friction is discounted. The English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton improved this analysis by defining force and mass, for objects traveling at speeds close to the speed of light, Newton’s laws were superseded by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. For atomic and subatomic particles, Newton’s laws were superseded by quantum theory, for everyday phenomena, however, Newton’s three laws of motion remain the cornerstone of dynamics, which is the study of what causes motion. In analogy to the distinction between quantum and classical mechanics, Einsteins general and special theories of relativity have expanded the scope of Newton, the differences between relativistic and Newtonian mechanics become significant and even dominant as the velocity of a massive body approaches the speed of light. Relativistic corrections are also needed for quantum mechanics, although general relativity has not been integrated, the two theories remain incompatible, a hurdle which must be overcome in developing a theory of everything
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Electromagnetism
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Electromagnetism is a branch of physics involving the study of the electromagnetic force, a type of physical interaction that occurs between electrically charged particles. The electromagnetic force usually exhibits electromagnetic fields such as fields, magnetic fields. The other three fundamental interactions are the interaction, the weak interaction, and gravitation. The word electromagnetism is a form of two Greek terms, ἤλεκτρον, ēlektron, amber, and μαγνῆτις λίθος magnētis lithos, which means magnesian stone. The electromagnetic force plays a role in determining the internal properties of most objects encountered in daily life. Ordinary matter takes its form as a result of forces between individual atoms and molecules in matter, and is a manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Electrons are bound by the force to atomic nuclei, and their orbital shapes. The electromagnetic force governs the processes involved in chemistry, which arise from interactions between the electrons of neighboring atoms, there are numerous mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field. In classical electrodynamics, electric fields are described as electric potential, although electromagnetism is considered one of the four fundamental forces, at high energy the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force. In the history of the universe, during the epoch the unified force broke into the two separate forces as the universe cooled. Originally, electricity and magnetism were considered to be two separate forces, Magnetic poles attract or repel one another in a manner similar to positive and negative charges and always exist as pairs, every north pole is yoked to a south pole. An electric current inside a wire creates a corresponding magnetic field outside the wire. Its direction depends on the direction of the current in the wire. A current is induced in a loop of wire when it is moved toward or away from a field, or a magnet is moved towards or away from it. While preparing for a lecture on 21 April 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted made a surprising observation. As he was setting up his materials, he noticed a compass needle deflected away from north when the electric current from the battery he was using was switched on. At the time of discovery, Ørsted did not suggest any explanation of the phenomenon. However, three later he began more intensive investigations
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Thermodynamics
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Thermodynamics is a branch of science concerned with heat and temperature and their relation to energy and work. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of thermodynamics, the laws of thermodynamics are explained in terms of microscopic constituents by statistical mechanics. Thermodynamics applies to a variety of topics in science and engineering, especially physical chemistry, chemical engineering. The initial application of thermodynamics to mechanical heat engines was extended early on to the study of chemical compounds, Chemical thermodynamics studies the nature of the role of entropy in the process of chemical reactions and has provided the bulk of expansion and knowledge of the field. Other formulations of thermodynamics emerged in the following decades, statistical thermodynamics, or statistical mechanics, concerned itself with statistical predictions of the collective motion of particles from their microscopic behavior. In 1909, Constantin Carathéodory presented a mathematical approach to the field in his axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. A description of any thermodynamic system employs the four laws of thermodynamics that form an axiomatic basis, the first law specifies that energy can be exchanged between physical systems as heat and work. In thermodynamics, interactions between large ensembles of objects are studied and categorized, central to this are the concepts of the thermodynamic system and its surroundings. A system is composed of particles, whose average motions define its properties, properties can be combined to express internal energy and thermodynamic potentials, which are useful for determining conditions for equilibrium and spontaneous processes. With these tools, thermodynamics can be used to describe how systems respond to changes in their environment and this can be applied to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, such as engines, phase transitions, chemical reactions, transport phenomena, and even black holes. This article is focused mainly on classical thermodynamics which primarily studies systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, non-equilibrium thermodynamics is often treated as an extension of the classical treatment, but statistical mechanics has brought many advances to that field. Guericke was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotles long-held supposition that nature abhors a vacuum. Shortly after Guericke, the English physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guerickes designs and, in 1656, in coordination with English scientist Robert Hooke, using this pump, Boyle and Hooke noticed a correlation between pressure, temperature, and volume. In time, Boyles Law was formulated, which states that pressure, later designs implemented a steam release valve that kept the machine from exploding. By watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and he did not, however, follow through with his design. Nevertheless, in 1697, based on Papins designs, engineer Thomas Savery built the first engine, although these early engines were crude and inefficient, they attracted the attention of the leading scientists of the time. Black and Watt performed experiments together, but it was Watt who conceived the idea of the condenser which resulted in a large increase in steam engine efficiency. Drawing on all the work led Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, to publish Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire
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Quantum mechanics
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Quantum mechanics, including quantum field theory, is a branch of physics which is the fundamental theory of nature at small scales and low energies of atoms and subatomic particles. Classical physics, the physics existing before quantum mechanics, derives from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid only at large scales, early quantum theory was profoundly reconceived in the mid-1920s. The reconceived theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms, in one of them, a mathematical function, the wave function, provides information about the probability amplitude of position, momentum, and other physical properties of a particle. In 1803, Thomas Young, an English polymath, performed the famous experiment that he later described in a paper titled On the nature of light. This experiment played a role in the general acceptance of the wave theory of light. In 1838, Michael Faraday discovered cathode rays, Plancks hypothesis that energy is radiated and absorbed in discrete quanta precisely matched the observed patterns of black-body radiation. In 1896, Wilhelm Wien empirically determined a distribution law of black-body radiation, ludwig Boltzmann independently arrived at this result by considerations of Maxwells equations. However, it was only at high frequencies and underestimated the radiance at low frequencies. Later, Planck corrected this model using Boltzmanns statistical interpretation of thermodynamics and proposed what is now called Plancks law, following Max Plancks solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, Albert Einstein offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect. Among the first to study quantum phenomena in nature were Arthur Compton, C. V. Raman, robert Andrews Millikan studied the photoelectric effect experimentally, and Albert Einstein developed a theory for it. In 1913, Peter Debye extended Niels Bohrs theory of structure, introducing elliptical orbits. This phase is known as old quantum theory, according to Planck, each energy element is proportional to its frequency, E = h ν, where h is Plancks constant. Planck cautiously insisted that this was simply an aspect of the processes of absorption and emission of radiation and had nothing to do with the reality of the radiation itself. In fact, he considered his quantum hypothesis a mathematical trick to get the right rather than a sizable discovery. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, lower energy/frequency means increased time and vice versa, photons of differing frequencies all deliver the same amount of action, but do so in varying time intervals. High frequency waves are damaging to human tissue because they deliver their action packets concentrated in time, the Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr became widely accepted. In the mid-1920s, developments in mechanics led to its becoming the standard formulation for atomic physics. In the summer of 1925, Bohr and Heisenberg published results that closed the old quantum theory, out of deference to their particle-like behavior in certain processes and measurements, light quanta came to be called photons
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Theory of relativity
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The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein, special relativity and general relativity. Special relativity applies to particles and their interactions, describing all their physical phenomena except gravity. General relativity explains the law of gravitation and its relation to other forces of nature and it applies to the cosmological and astrophysical realm, including astronomy. The theory transformed theoretical physics and astronomy during the 20th century and it introduced concepts including spacetime as a unified entity of space and time, relativity of simultaneity, kinematic and gravitational time dilation, and length contraction. In the field of physics, relativity improved the science of elementary particles and their fundamental interactions, with relativity, cosmology and astrophysics predicted extraordinary astronomical phenomena such as neutron stars, black holes, and gravitational waves. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others did subsequent work, Einstein developed general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916, the term theory of relativity was based on the expression relative theory used in 1906 by Planck, who emphasized how the theory uses the principle of relativity. In the discussion section of the paper, Alfred Bucherer used for the first time the expression theory of relativity. By the 1920s, the community understood and accepted special relativity. It rapidly became a significant and necessary tool for theorists and experimentalists in the new fields of physics, nuclear physics. By comparison, general relativity did not appear to be as useful and it seemed to offer little potential for experimental test, as most of its assertions were on an astronomical scale. Its mathematics of general relativity seemed difficult and fully understandable only by a number of people. Around 1960, general relativity became central to physics and astronomy, new mathematical techniques to apply to general relativity streamlined calculations and made its concepts more easily visualized. Special relativity is a theory of the structure of spacetime and it was introduced in Einsteins 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Special relativity is based on two postulates which are contradictory in classical mechanics, The laws of physics are the same for all observers in motion relative to one another. The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, the resultant theory copes with experiment better than classical mechanics. For instance, postulate 2 explains the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment, moreover, the theory has many surprising and counterintuitive consequences. Some of these are, Relativity of simultaneity, Two events, simultaneous for one observer, time dilation, Moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observers stationary clock
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Nuclear physics
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Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions. Other forms of matter are also studied. Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the atom as a whole, discoveries in nuclear physics have led to applications in many fields. Such applications are studied in the field of nuclear engineering, Particle physics evolved out of nuclear physics and the two fields are typically taught in close association. Nuclear astrophysics, the application of physics to astrophysics, is crucial in explaining the inner workings of stars. The discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson a year later was an indication that the atom had internal structure, in the years that followed, radioactivity was extensively investigated, notably by Marie and Pierre Curie as well as by Ernest Rutherford and his collaborators. By the turn of the physicists had also discovered three types of radiation emanating from atoms, which they named alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Experiments by Otto Hahn in 1911 and by James Chadwick in 1914 discovered that the beta decay spectrum was continuous rather than discrete. That is, electrons were ejected from the atom with a range of energies, rather than the discrete amounts of energy that were observed in gamma. This was a problem for physics at the time, because it seemed to indicate that energy was not conserved in these decays. The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Becquerel for his discovery and to Marie, Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances. In 1905 Albert Einstein formulated the idea of mass–energy equivalence, in 1906 Ernest Rutherford published Retardation of the α Particle from Radium in passing through matter. Hans Geiger expanded on this work in a communication to the Royal Society with experiments he and Rutherford had done, passing alpha particles through air, aluminum foil and gold leaf. More work was published in 1909 by Geiger and Ernest Marsden, in 1911–1912 Rutherford went before the Royal Society to explain the experiments and propound the new theory of the atomic nucleus as we now understand it. The plum pudding model had predicted that the particles should come out of the foil with their trajectories being at most slightly bent. But Rutherford instructed his team to look for something that shocked him to observe and he likened it to firing a bullet at tissue paper and having it bounce off. As an example, in this model consisted of a nucleus with 14 protons and 7 electrons. The Rutherford model worked well until studies of nuclear spin were carried out by Franco Rasetti at the California Institute of Technology in 1929
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Particle physics
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Particle physics is the branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation. By our current understanding, these particles are excitations of the quantum fields that also govern their interactions. The currently dominant theory explaining these fundamental particles and fields, along with their dynamics, is called the Standard Model, in more technical terms, they are described by quantum state vectors in a Hilbert space, which is also treated in quantum field theory. All particles and their interactions observed to date can be described almost entirely by a field theory called the Standard Model. The Standard Model, as formulated, has 61 elementary particles. Those elementary particles can combine to form composite particles, accounting for the hundreds of species of particles that have been discovered since the 1960s. The Standard Model has been found to agree with almost all the tests conducted to date. However, most particle physicists believe that it is a description of nature. In recent years, measurements of mass have provided the first experimental deviations from the Standard Model. The idea that all matter is composed of elementary particles dates from at least the 6th century BC, in the 19th century, John Dalton, through his work on stoichiometry, concluded that each element of nature was composed of a single, unique type of particle. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a variety of particles were found in collisions of particles from increasingly high-energy beams. It was referred to informally as the particle zoo, the current state of the classification of all elementary particles is explained by the Standard Model. It describes the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental interactions, the species of gauge bosons are the gluons, W−, W+ and Z bosons, and the photons. The Standard Model also contains 24 fundamental particles, which are the constituents of all matter, finally, the Standard Model also predicted the existence of a type of boson known as the Higgs boson. Early in the morning on 4 July 2012, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they had found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs boson, the worlds major particle physics laboratories are, Brookhaven National Laboratory. Its main facility is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides heavy ions such as gold ions and it is the worlds first heavy ion collider, and the worlds only polarized proton collider. Its main projects are now the electron-positron colliders VEPP-2000, operated since 2006 and its main project is now the Large Hadron Collider, which had its first beam circulation on 10 September 2008, and is now the worlds most energetic collider of protons. It also became the most energetic collider of heavy ions after it began colliding lead ions and its main facility is the Hadron Elektron Ring Anlage, which collides electrons and positrons with protons
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Atomic, molecular, and optical physics
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Atomic, molecular, and optical physics is the study of matter-matter and light-matter interactions, at the scale of one or a few atoms and energy scales around several electron volts. The three areas are closely interrelated, AMO theory includes classical, semi-classical and quantum treatments. Atomic physics is the subfield of AMO that studies atoms as a system of electrons. The term atomic physics is associated with nuclear power and nuclear bombs, due to the synonymous use of atomic. However, physicists distinguish between atomic physics — which deals with the atom as a system consisting of a nucleus and electrons — and nuclear physics, the important experimental techniques are the various types of spectroscopy. Molecular physics, while related to atomic physics, also overlaps greatly with theoretical chemistry, physical chemistry. Both subfields are primarily concerned with electronic structure and the processes by which these arrangements change. Generally this work involves using quantum mechanics, for molecular physics this approach is known as quantum chemistry. One important aspect of physics is that the essential atomic orbital theory in the field of atomic physics expands to the molecular orbital theory. Molecular physics is concerned with processes in molecules, but it is additionally concerned with effects due to the molecular structure. Additionally to the electronic states which are known from atoms, molecules are able to rotate. These rotations and vibrations are quantized, there are discrete energy levels, the smallest energy differences exist between different rotational states, therefore pure rotational spectra are in the far infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Vibrational spectra are in the infrared and spectra resulting from electronic transitions are mostly in the visible. From measuring rotational and vibrational properties of molecules like the distance between the nuclei can be calculated. As with many fields, strict delineation can be highly contrived and atomic physics is often considered in the wider context of atomic, molecular. Physics research groups are usually so classified and it differs from general optics and optical engineering in that it is focused on the discovery and application of new phenomena. Often the same people are involved in both the research and the applied technology development. Researchers in optical physics use and develop light sources that span the spectrum from microwaves to X-rays
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Theoretical physics
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Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to physics, which uses experimental tools to probe these phenomena. The advancement of science depends in general on the interplay between experimental studies and theory, in some cases, theoretical physics adheres to standards of mathematical rigor while giving little weight to experiments and observations. Conversely, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect, a physical theory is a model of physical events. It is judged by the extent to which its predictions agree with empirical observations, the quality of a physical theory is also judged on its ability to make new predictions which can be verified by new observations. A physical theory similarly differs from a theory, in the sense that the word theory has a different meaning in mathematical terms. A physical theory involves one or more relationships between various measurable quantities, archimedes realized that a ship floats by displacing its mass of water, Pythagoras understood the relation between the length of a vibrating string and the musical tone it produces. Other examples include entropy as a measure of the uncertainty regarding the positions and motions of unseen particles, Theoretical physics consists of several different approaches. In this regard, theoretical particle physics forms a good example, for instance, phenomenologists might employ empirical formulas to agree with experimental results, often without deep physical understanding. Modelers often appear much like phenomenologists, but try to model speculative theories that have certain desirable features, some attempt to create approximate theories, called effective theories, because fully developed theories may be regarded as unsolvable or too complicated. Other theorists may try to unify, formalise, reinterpret or generalise extant theories, or create completely new ones altogether. Sometimes the vision provided by pure mathematical systems can provide clues to how a system might be modeled, e. g. the notion, due to Riemann and others. Theoretical problems that need computational investigation are often the concern of computational physics, Theoretical advances may consist in setting aside old, incorrect paradigms or may be an alternative model that provides answers that are more accurate or that can be more widely applied. In the latter case, a correspondence principle will be required to recover the previously known result, sometimes though, advances may proceed along different paths. However, an exception to all the above is the wave–particle duality, Physical theories become accepted if they are able to make correct predictions and no incorrect ones. They are also likely to be accepted if they connect a wide range of phenomena. Testing the consequences of a theory is part of the scientific method, Physical theories can be grouped into three categories, mainstream theories, proposed theories and fringe theories. Theoretical physics began at least 2,300 years ago, under the Pre-socratic philosophy, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the concept of experimental science, the counterpoint to theory, began with scholars such as Ibn al-Haytham and Francis Bacon
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Dark matter
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Dark matter is an unidentified type of matter distinct from dark energy, baryonic matter, and neutrinos whose existence would explain a number of otherwise puzzling astronomical observations. The name refers to the fact that it does not emit or interact with radiation, such as light. The standard model of cosmology indicates that the total mass–energy of the universe contains 4. 9% ordinary matter,26. 8% dark matter and 68. 3% dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 84. 5% of total mass, the most widely accepted hypothesis on the form for dark matter is that it is composed of weakly interacting massive particles that interact only through gravity and the weak force. All these lines of evidence suggest that galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the universe as a whole contain far more matter than that which is observable via electromagnetic signals. Many experiments to detect proposed dark matter particles through non-gravitational means are under way, however, no dark matter particle has been conclusively identified. ”In 1906 Henri Poincaré in the “The Milky Way and Theory of Gases” used dark matter, ” or “matière obscure” in French in discussing Kelvins work. The first to suggest the existence of matter was Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn in 1922. Fellow Dutchman and radio astronomy pioneer Jan Oort also hypothesized the existence of matter in 1932. In 1933, Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who studied galactic clusters while working at the California Institute of Technology, Zwicky applied the virial theorem to the Coma galaxy cluster and obtained evidence of unseen mass that he called dunkle Materie dark matter. Zwicky estimated its mass based on the motions of galaxies near its edge and compared that to an estimate based on its brightness and he estimated that the cluster had about 400 times more mass than was visually observable. The gravity effect of the galaxies was far too small for such fast orbits. Based on these conclusions, Zwicky inferred that some unseen matter provided the mass and this was the first formal inference about the existence of dark matter. However, Zwicky did correctly infer that the bulk of the matter was dark, the first robust indications that the mass to light ratio was anything other than unity came from measurements of galaxy rotation curves. In 1939, Horace W. Babcock reported the rotation curve for the Andromeda nebula and he attributed it to either light absorption within the galaxy or modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to missing matter. Vera Rubin and Kent Ford in the 1960s–1970s provided further strong evidence, Rubin worked with a new spectrograph to measure the velocity curve of edge-on spiral galaxies with greater accuracy. This result was confirmed in 1978, an influential paper presented Rubins results in 1980. According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle, the search for this particle, by a variety of means, is one of the major efforts in particle physics. In cosmology, the CMB is explained as relic radiation which has travelled freely since the era of recombination, the CMB’s anisotropies are explained as the result of small primordial density fluctuations, and subsequent acoustic oscillations in the photon-baryon plasma whose restoring force is gravity
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Dark energy
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In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most accepted hypothesis to explain the observations since the 1990s indicating that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Assuming that the model of cosmology is correct, the best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68. 3% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe. The mass–energy of dark matter and ordinary matter contribute 26. 8% and 4. 9%, respectively, the density of dark energy is very low, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it comes to dominate the mass–energy of the universe because it is uniform across space, contributions from scalar fields that are constant in space are usually also included in the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant can be formulated to be equivalent to the zero-point radiation of space i. e. the vacuum energy, scalar fields that change in space can be difficult to distinguish from a cosmological constant because the change may be extremely slow. High-precision measurements of the expansion of the universe are required to understand how the rate changes over time. In general relativity, the evolution of the rate is estimated from the curvature of the universe. Measuring the equation of state for energy is one of the biggest efforts in observational cosmology today. The equilibrium is unstable, if the universe expands slightly, then the expansion releases vacuum energy, likewise, a universe which contracts slightly will continue contracting. These sorts of disturbances are inevitable, due to the distribution of matter throughout the universe. Further, observations made by Edwin Hubble in 1929 showed that the universe appears to be expanding, einstein reportedly referred to his failure to predict the idea of a dynamic universe, in contrast to a static universe, as his greatest blunder. Alan Guth and Alexei Starobinsky proposed in 1980 that a negative pressure field, similar in concept to dark energy, inflation postulates that some repulsive force, qualitatively similar to dark energy, resulted in an enormous and exponential expansion of the universe slightly after the Big Bang. Such expansion is a feature of most current models of the Big Bang. It is unclear what relation, if any, exists between energy and inflation. Even after inflationary models became accepted, the constant was thought to be irrelevant to the current universe. Nearly all inflation models predict that the density of the universe should be very close to the critical density. During the 1980s, most cosmological research focused on models with critical density in matter only, usually 95% cold dark matter, then in 2001, the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey gave strong evidence that the matter density is around 30% of critical
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Black hole
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A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon, although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed. In many ways a black hole acts like a black body. Moreover, quantum theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Black holes were considered a mathematical curiosity, it was during the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality, black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings, by absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form. There is general consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies, despite its invisible interior, the presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Matter that falls onto a black hole can form an accretion disk heated by friction. If there are other stars orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black holes mass, such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars.3 million solar masses. On 15 June 2016, a detection of a gravitational wave event from colliding black holes was announced. The idea of a body so massive that light could not escape was briefly proposed by astronomical pioneer John Michell in a letter published in 1783-4. Michell correctly noted that such supermassive but non-radiating bodies might be detectable through their effects on nearby visible bodies. In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, only a few months later, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations, which describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass. A few months after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the solution for the point mass. This solution had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, the nature of this surface was not quite understood at the time
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Time travel
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Some ancient myths depict skipping forward in time. The Buddhist Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time, in the period of our century, one hundred years, only a single day, twenty four hours would have passed for them. The Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō, first described in the Nihongi tells of a fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace. After three days, he returns home to his village and finds himself 300 years in the future, where he has forgotten, his house is in ruins. Early science-fiction stories feature characters who sleep for years and awaken in a changed society. Among them LAn 2440, rêve sil en fût jamais by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories. Decades-long and centuries-long sleep is featured in ancient myths. Like forward time travel, backward time travel has an uncertain origin, the narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, meets Aristotle, and goes on a voyage with Alexander the Great before returning to the 19th century. While the narrator waits under a tree for a coach to take him out of Newcastle and he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery and explains to him the developments of the coming centuries. However, the story never makes it clear whether these events are real or a dream, charles Dickenss A Christmas Carol has early depictions of time travel in both directions, as the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past and future. However, these might be interpreted as visions rather than as time travel because Scrooge experiences the time periods as a rather than as a participant. A clearer example of time travel is found in the popular 1861 book Paris avant les hommes by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard. This may have been the first story to feature an alternate history created as a result of time travel. Early time machines One of the first stories to feature time travel by means of a machine is The Clock that Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell, however, the mechanism borders on fantasy. An unusual clock, when wound, runs backwards and transports people nearby back in time, the author does not explain the origin or properties of the clock. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbaus El Anacronópete may have been the first story to feature a vessel engineered to travel through time, H. G. Wellss The Time Machine popularized the concept of time travel by mechanical means. In technical papers, physicists generally avoid the language of moving or traveling through time. Movement normally refers only to a change in position as the time coordinate is varied
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Wormhole
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A wormhole is a solution of the Einstein field equations having a non-trivial structure linking separate points in spacetime, much like a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in spacetime. Such connections are consistent with the General Theory of Relativity, yet their existence remains hypothetical, a wormhole may connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years or more, short distances such as a few meters, different universes, and/or different points in time. In 1921, Hermann Weyl proposed a theory in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy. The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the term wormhole in 1957 and this analysis forces one to consider situations. Formalizing this idea leads to such as the following, taken from Matt Vissers Lorentzian Wormholes. Geometrically, wormholes can be described as regions of spacetime that constrain the incremental deformation of closed surfaces. For example, in Enrico Rodrigos The Physics of Stargates, a wormhole is defined informally as, the equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Wormholes that could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if exotic matter with energy density could be used to stabilize them. All four regions can be seen in a diagram that uses Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates. However, in 1962, John A. Wheeler and Robert W, according to general relativity, the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently compact mass forms a singular Schwarzschild black hole. In the Einstein–Cartan–Sciama–Kibble theory of gravity, however, it forms a regular Einstein–Rosen bridge and this theory extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part, the torsion tensor, as a dynamical variable. Torsion naturally accounts for the quantum-mechanical, intrinsic angular momentum of matter, the minimal coupling between torsion and Dirac spinors generates a repulsive spin–spin interaction that is significant in fermionic matter at extremely high densities. Such an interaction prevents the formation of a gravitational singularity, instead, the collapsing matter reaches an enormous but finite density and rebounds, forming the other side of the bridge. Many physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and others, the possibility of traversable wormholes in general relativity was first demonstrated in a 1973 paper by Homer Ellis and independently in a 1973 paper by K. A. Bronnikov. Ellis thoroughly analyzed the topology and the geodesics of the Ellis drainhole, showing it to be complete, horizonless, singularity-free. The drainhole is a manifold of Einsteins field equations for a vacuum space-time. The solution depends on two parameters, m, which fixes the strength of its field, and n. When m is set equal to 0, the gravitational field vanishes
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Cosmogony
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Cosmogony is any model concerning the origin of either the cosmos or universe. Developing a complete theoretical model has implications in both the philosophy of science and epistemology, the word comes from the Koine Greek κοσμογονία and the root of γίνομαι / γέγονα. The Big Bang theory is the cosmological model of the early development of the universe. The most commonly held view is that the universe was once a gravitational singularity, however, while this expansion is well-modeled by the Big Bang theory, the origins of the singularity remain as one of the unsolved problems in physics. Cosmologist and science communicator Sean M, one cosmogonical view sees time as fundamental and even eternal, The universe could have contained the singularity because the universe evolved or changed from a prior state. The other view, held by proponents like Stephen Hawking, says there was no change through time because time itself emerged along with this universe. Thus, it unclear what combination of stuff, space, or time emerged with the singularity. One problem in cosmogony is that there is no theoretical model that explains the earliest moments of the universes existence because of a lack of a testable theory of quantum gravity. Researchers in string theory and its extensions, and of quantum cosmology, have nevertheless proposed solutions of the type just discussed. Another issue facing the field of physics is a need for more expensive. Cosmogony can be distinguished from cosmology, which studies the universe at large and throughout its existence, there is some ambiguity between the two terms. For example, the argument from theology regarding the existence of God is technically an appeal to cosmogonical rather than cosmological ideas. In practice, there is a distinction between cosmological and cosmogonical ideas. Physical cosmology is the science that attempts to explain all observations relevant to the development, cosmogonists have only tentative theories for the early stages of the universe and its beginning. Therefore, significant technological and conceptual advances would be needed to propose a scientific test for cosmogonical theories, proposed theoretical scenarios differ radically, and include string theory and M-theory, the Hartle–Hawking initial state, string landscape, brane inflation, the Big Bang, and the ekpyrotic universe. Some of these models are compatible, whereas others are not
31.
Formation and evolution of the Solar System
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The formation of the Solar System began 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. This model, known as the hypothesis, was first developed in the 18th century by Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. Its subsequent development has interwoven a variety of disciplines including astronomy, physics, geology. Since the dawn of the age in the 1950s and the discovery of extrasolar planets in the 1990s. The Solar System has evolved considerably since its initial formation, many moons have formed from circling discs of gas and dust around their parent planets, while other moons are thought to have formed independently and later been captured by their planets. Still others, such as Earths Moon, may be the result of giant collisions, collisions between bodies have occurred continually up to the present day and have been central to the evolution of the Solar System. The positions of the planets often shifted due to gravitational interactions and this planetary migration is now thought to have been responsible for much of the Solar Systems early evolution. In the far distant future, the gravity of passing stars will gradually reduce the Suns retinue of planets, some planets will be destroyed, others ejected into interstellar space. Ultimately, over the course of tens of billions of years, the first step toward a theory of Solar System formation and evolution was the general acceptance of heliocentrism, which placed the Sun at the centre of the system and the Earth in orbit around it. This concept had developed for millennia, but was not widely accepted until the end of the 17th century, the first recorded use of the term Solar System dates from 1704. The most significant criticism of the hypothesis was its apparent inability to explain the Suns relative lack of momentum when compared to the planets. However, since the early 1980s studies of stars have shown them to be surrounded by cool discs of dust and gas, exactly as the nebular hypothesis predicts. Understanding of how the Sun is expected to continue to evolve required an understanding of the source of its power, in 1935, Eddington went further and suggested that other elements also might form within stars. Fred Hoyle elaborated on this premise by arguing that evolved stars called red giants created many elements heavier than hydrogen, when a red giant finally casts off its outer layers, these elements would then be recycled to form other star systems. The nebular hypothesis says that the Solar System formed from the collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud. The cloud was about 20 parsec across, while the fragments were roughly 1 parsec across, the further collapse of the fragments led to the formation of dense cores 0. 01–0.1 pc in size. One of these fragments formed what became the Solar System. The remaining 2% of the mass consisted of elements that were created by nucleosynthesis in earlier generations of stars
32.
Stellar evolution
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Stellar evolution is the process by which a star changes over the course of time. The table shows the lifetimes of stars as a function of their masses, all stars are born from collapsing clouds of gas and dust, often called nebulae or molecular clouds. Over the course of millions of years, these protostars settle down into a state of equilibrium, nuclear fusion powers a star for most of its life. Initially the energy is generated by the fusion of hydrogen atoms at the core of the main-sequence star, later, as the preponderance of atoms at the core becomes helium, stars like the Sun begin to fuse hydrogen along a spherical shell surrounding the core. This process causes the star to gradually grow in size, passing through the subgiant stage until it reaches the red giant phase. Once a star like the Sun has exhausted its fuel, its core collapses into a dense white dwarf. Stars with around ten or more times the mass of the Sun can explode in a supernova as their inert iron cores collapse into a dense neutron star or black hole. Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a star, as most stellar changes occur too slowly to be detected. Instead, astrophysicists come to understand how stars evolve by observing numerous stars at various points in their lifetime, in June 2015, astronomers reported evidence for Population III stars in the Cosmos Redshift 7 galaxy at z =6.60. Stellar evolution starts with the collapse of a giant molecular cloud. Typical giant molecular clouds are roughly 100 light-years across and contain up to 6,000,000 solar masses, as it collapses, a giant molecular cloud breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. In each of these fragments, the collapsing gas releases gravitational potential energy as heat, as its temperature and pressure increase, a fragment condenses into a rotating sphere of superhot gas known as a protostar. A protostar continues to grow by accretion of gas and dust from the molecular cloud, further development is determined by its mass. Protostars are encompassed in dust, and are more readily visible at infrared wavelengths. Observations from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer have been important for unveiling numerous Galactic protostars. Protostars with masses less than roughly 0.08 M☉ never reach high enough for nuclear fusion of hydrogen to begin. These are known as brown dwarfs, the International Astronomical Union defines brown dwarfs as stars massive enough to fuse deuterium at some point in their lives. Objects smaller than 13 MJ are classified as sub-brown dwarfs, both types, deuterium-burning and not, shine dimly and die away slowly, cooling gradually over hundreds of millions of years
33.
Galaxy formation and evolution
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Galaxy formation is hypothesized to occur, from structure formation theories, as a result of tiny quantum fluctuations in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Because of the inability to conduct experiments in space, the only way to “test” theories. Explanations for how galaxies formed and evolved must be able to predict the properties and types of galaxies. Edwin Hubble created the first galaxy classification scheme known as the Hubble tuning-fork diagram and it partitioned galaxies into ellipticals, normal spirals, barred spirals, and irregulars. These groups divide into blue star-forming galaxies that are more like spiral types, spiral galaxies are quite thin, dense, and rotate relatively fast, while the stars in elliptical galaxies have randomly-oriented orbits. The majority of mass in galaxies is made up of matter, a substance which is not directly observable. The majority of giant galaxies contain a black hole in their centers. The black hole mass is tied to the host galaxy bulge or spheroid mass, metallicity has a positive correlation with the absolute magnitude of a galaxy. This is not the case instead the tuning fork diagram shows an evolution from simple to complex with no temporal connotations intended, astronomers now believe that disk galaxies likely formed first, then evolved into elliptical galaxies through galaxy mergers. The earliest stage in the evolution of galaxies is the formation, when a galaxy forms, it has a disk shape and is called a spiral galaxy due to spiral-like arm structures located on the disk. There are different theories on how these disk-like distributions of stars develop from a cloud of matter, however, at present, olin Eggen, Donald Lynden-Bell, and Allan Sandage in 1962, proposed a theory that disk galaxies form through a monolithic collapse of a large gas cloud. The distribution of matter in the universe was in clumps that consisted mostly of dark matter. These clumps interacted gravitationally, putting tidal torques on each other that acted to give them some angular momentum, as the baryonic matter cooled, it dissipated some energy and contracted toward the center. With angular momentum conserved, the matter near the center speeds up its rotation, then, like a spinning ball of pizza dough, the matter forms into a tight disk. Once the disk cools, the gas is not gravitationally stable and it breaks, and these smaller clouds of gas form stars. Since the dark matter does not dissipate as it only interacts gravitationally, observations show that there are stars located outside the disk, which does not quite fit the pizza dough model. It was first proposed by Leonard Searle and Robert Zinn that galaxies form by the coalescence of smaller progenitors, known as a top-down formation scenario, this theory is quite simple yet no longer widely accepted. More recent theories include the clustering of dark matter halos in the bottom-up process and this still results in disk-like distributions of baryonic matter with dark matter forming the halo for all the same reasons as in the top-down theory
34.
Magnetohydrodynamics
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Magnetohydrodynamics is the study of the magnetic properties of electrically conducting fluids. Examples of such magnetofluids include plasmas, liquid metals, salt water, the word magnetohydrodynamics is derived from magneto- meaning magnetic field, hydro- meaning water, and -dynamics meaning movement. The field of MHD was initiated by Hannes Alfvén, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970. The fundamental concept behind MHD is that magnetic fields can induce currents in a conductive fluid. The set of equations that describe MHD are a combination of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics and these differential equations must be solved simultaneously, either analytically or numerically. The importance of the waves in this respect are pointed out. The ebbing salty water flowing past Londons Waterloo Bridge interacts with the Earths magnetic field to produce a difference between the two river-banks. Michael Faraday tried this experiment in 1832 but the current was too small to measure with the equipment at the time, however, by a similar process the voltage induced by the tide in the English Channel was measured in 1851. The simplest form of MHD, Ideal MHD, assumes that the fluid has so little resistivity that it can be treated as a perfect conductor and this is the limit of infinite magnetic Reynolds number. In ideal MHD, Lenzs law dictates that the fluid is in a sense tied to the field lines. To explain, in ideal MHD a small volume of fluid surrounding a field line will continue to lie along a magnetic field line. This is sometimes referred to as the field lines being frozen in the fluid. This difficulty in reconnecting magnetic field makes it possible to store energy by moving the fluid or the source of the magnetic field. The energy can become available if the conditions for ideal MHD break down. The ideal MHD equations consist of the continuity equation, the Cauchy momentum equation, Amperes Law neglecting displacement current, as with any fluid description to a kinetic system, a closure approximation must be applied to highest moment of the particle distribution equation. This is often accomplished with approximations to the flux through a condition of adiabaticity or isothermality. The main quantities which characterize the electrically conducting fluid are the plasma velocity field v, the current density J, the mass density ρ. The flowing electric charge in the plasma is the source of a magnetic field B, All quantities generally vary with time t
35.
Observable universe
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There are at least two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the universe is roughly the same in every direction. That is, the universe is a spherical volume centered on the observer. Every location in the Universe has its own universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered on Earth. The word observable used in this sense does not depend on modern technology actually permits detection of radiation from an object in this region. It simply indicates that it is possible in principle for light or other signals from the object to reach an observer on Earth, in practice, we can see light only from as far back as the time of photon decoupling in the recombination epoch. That is when particles were first able to emit photons that were not quickly re-absorbed by other particles, before then, the Universe was filled with a plasma that was opaque to photons. The detection of gravitational waves indicates there is now a possibility of detecting signals from before the recombination epoch. The surface of last scattering is the collection of points in space at the distance that photons from the time of photon decoupling just reach us today. These are the photons we detect today as cosmic microwave background radiation, however, with future technology, it may be possible to observe the still older relic neutrino background, or even more distant events via gravitational waves. It is estimated that the diameter of the universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs. The total mass of matter in the universe can be calculated using the critical density. Some parts of the Universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang to have had time to reach Earth. In the future, light from distant galaxies will have had time to travel. This fact can be used to define a type of cosmic event horizon whose distance from the Earth changes over time, both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term universe to mean observable universe. It is plausible that the galaxies within our observable universe represent only a fraction of the galaxies in the Universe. If the Universe is finite but unbounded, it is possible that the Universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies and it is difficult to test this hypothesis experimentally because different images of a galaxy would show different eras in its history, and consequently might appear quite different
36.
Matter
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All the everyday objects that we can bump into, touch or squeeze are ultimately composed of atoms. This ordinary atomic matter is in turn made up of interacting subatomic particles—usually a nucleus of protons and neutrons, typically, science considers these composite particles matter because they have both rest mass and volume. By contrast, massless particles, such as photons, are not considered matter, however, not all particles with rest mass have a classical volume, since fundamental particles such as quarks and leptons are considered point particles with no effective size or volume. Nevertheless, quarks and leptons together make up ordinary matter, Matter exists in states, the classical solid, liquid, and gas, as well as the more exotic plasma, Bose–Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates, and quark–gluon plasma. For much of the history of the natural sciences people have contemplated the nature of matter. The idea that matter was built of discrete building blocks, the so-called particulate theory of matter, was first put forward by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, Matter should not be confused with mass, as the two are not the same in modern physics. Matter is itself a physical substance of which systems may be composed, while mass is not a substance, while there are different views on what should be considered matter, the mass of a substance or system is the same irrespective of any such definition of matter. Another difference is that matter has an opposite called antimatter, antimatter has the same mass property as its normal matter counterpart. Different fields of use the term matter in different, and sometimes incompatible. Some of these ways are based on loose historical meanings, from a time there was no reason to distinguish mass from simply a quantity of matter. As such, there is no universally agreed scientific meaning of the word matter. Scientifically, the mass is well-defined, but matter can be defined in several ways. Sometimes in the field of matter is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass, such as quarks. However, in physics and chemistry, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties, the so-called wave–particle duality. A definition of based on its physical and chemical structure is. Such atomic matter is sometimes termed ordinary matter. As an example, deoxyribonucleic acid molecules are matter under this definition because they are made of atoms and this definition can extend to include charged atoms and molecules, so as to include plasmas and electrolytes, which are not obviously included in the atoms definition. Alternatively, one can adopt the protons, neutrons, and electrons definition, at a microscopic level, the constituent particles of matter such as protons, neutrons, and electrons obey the laws of quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality
37.
Cosmic ray
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Cosmic rays are high-energy radiation, mainly originating outside the Solar System. Upon impact with the Earths atmosphere, cosmic rays can produce showers of particles that sometimes reach the surface. Composed primarily of protons and atomic nuclei, they are of mysterious origin. Data from the Fermi space telescope have been interpreted as evidence that a significant fraction of cosmic rays originate from the supernovae explosions of stars. Active galactic nuclei probably also produce cosmic rays, the term ray is a historical accident, as cosmic rays were at first, and wrongly, thought to be mostly electromagnetic radiation. In current usage, the cosmic ray almost exclusively refers to massive particles. Massive particles – those that have rest mass – can gain additional, kinetic, mass-energy when they are moving, through this process, some particles acquire tremendously high mass-energies. These are significantly higher than the energy of even the highest-energy photons detected to date. The energy of the massless photon depends solely on frequency, not speed, at the higher end of the energy spectrum, relativistic kinetic energy is the main source of the mass-energy of cosmic rays. Hence, the highest-energy detected fermionic cosmic ray was around 3×106 times more energetic than the highest-energy detected cosmic photons, of primary cosmic rays, which originate outside of Earths atmosphere, about 99% are the nuclei of well-known atoms, and about 1% are solitary electrons. Of the nuclei, about 90% are simple protons, i. e. hydrogen nuclei, 9% are alpha particles, identical to helium nuclei, a very small fraction are stable particles of antimatter, such as positrons or antiprotons. The precise nature of this fraction is an area of active research. An active search from Earth orbit for anti-alpha particles has failed to detect them, one can show that such enormous energies might be achieved by means of the Centrifugal mechanism of acceleration in Active galactic nuclei. At 50 J, the highest-energy ultra-high-energy cosmic rays have energies comparable to the energy of a 90-kilometre-per-hour baseball. As a result of discoveries, there has been interest in investigating cosmic rays of even greater energies. Most cosmic rays, however, do not have such extreme energies, however, his paper published in Physikalische Zeitschrift was not widely accepted. In 1911 Domenico Pacini observed simultaneous variations of the rate of ionization over a lake, over the sea, Pacini concluded from the decrease of radioactivity underwater that a certain part of the ionization must be due to sources other than the radioactivity of the Earth. In 1912, Victor Hess carried three enhanced-accuracy Wulf electrometers to an altitude of 5300 meters in a balloon flight
38.
General relativity
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General relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and the current description of gravitation in modern physics. General relativity generalizes special relativity and Newtons law of gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter, the relation is specified by the Einstein field equations, a system of partial differential equations. Examples of such differences include gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing, the redshift of light. The predictions of relativity have been confirmed in all observations. Although general relativity is not the only theory of gravity. Einsteins theory has important astrophysical implications, for example, it implies the existence of black holes—regions of space in which space and time are distorted in such a way that nothing, not even light, can escape—as an end-state for massive stars. The bending of light by gravity can lead to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, General relativity also predicts the existence of gravitational waves, which have since been observed directly by physics collaboration LIGO. In addition, general relativity is the basis of current cosmological models of an expanding universe. Soon after publishing the special theory of relativity in 1905, Einstein started thinking about how to incorporate gravity into his new relativistic framework. In 1907, beginning with a thought experiment involving an observer in free fall. After numerous detours and false starts, his work culminated in the presentation to the Prussian Academy of Science in November 1915 of what are now known as the Einstein field equations. These equations specify how the geometry of space and time is influenced by whatever matter and radiation are present, the Einstein field equations are nonlinear and very difficult to solve. Einstein used approximation methods in working out initial predictions of the theory, but as early as 1916, the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild found the first non-trivial exact solution to the Einstein field equations, the Schwarzschild metric. This solution laid the groundwork for the description of the stages of gravitational collapse. In 1917, Einstein applied his theory to the universe as a whole, in line with contemporary thinking, he assumed a static universe, adding a new parameter to his original field equations—the cosmological constant—to match that observational presumption. By 1929, however, the work of Hubble and others had shown that our universe is expanding and this is readily described by the expanding cosmological solutions found by Friedmann in 1922, which do not require a cosmological constant. Lemaître used these solutions to formulate the earliest version of the Big Bang models, in which our universe has evolved from an extremely hot, Einstein later declared the cosmological constant the biggest blunder of his life
39.
String theory
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In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. It describes how strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge. In string theory, one of the vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton. Thus string theory is a theory of quantum gravity, String theory is a broad and varied subject that attempts to address a number of deep questions of fundamental physics. Despite much work on problems, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world or how much freedom the theory allows to choose the details. String theory was first studied in the late 1960s as a theory of the nuclear force. Subsequently, it was realized that the properties that made string theory unsuitable as a theory of nuclear physics made it a promising candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. The earliest version of string theory, bosonic string theory, incorporated only the class of known as bosons. It later developed into superstring theory, which posits a connection called supersymmetry between bosons and the class of particles called fermions. In late 1997, theorists discovered an important relationship called the AdS/CFT correspondence, one of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. Another issue is that the theory is thought to describe an enormous landscape of possible universes, and these issues have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to physics and question the value of continued research on string theory unification. In the twentieth century, two theoretical frameworks emerged for formulating the laws of physics, one of these frameworks was Albert Einsteins general theory of relativity, a theory that explains the force of gravity and the structure of space and time. The other was quantum mechanics, a different formalism for describing physical phenomena using probability. In spite of successes, there are still many problems that remain to be solved. One of the deepest problems in physics is the problem of quantum gravity. The general theory of relativity is formulated within the framework of classical physics, in addition to the problem of developing a consistent theory of quantum gravity, there are many other fundamental problems in the physics of atomic nuclei, black holes, and the early universe. String theory is a framework that attempts to address these questions
40.
Aristotle
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Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidice, on the northern periphery of Classical Greece. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, at seventeen or eighteen years of age, he joined Platos Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven. Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, teaching Alexander the Great gave Aristotle many opportunities and an abundance of supplies. He established a library in the Lyceum which aided in the production of many of his hundreds of books and he believed all peoples concepts and all of their knowledge was ultimately based on perception. Aristotles views on natural sciences represent the groundwork underlying many of his works, Aristotles views on physical science profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, some of Aristotles zoological observations, such as on the hectocotyl arm of the octopus, were not confirmed or refuted until the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as The First Teacher and his ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotles philosophy continue to be the object of academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues – Cicero described his style as a river of gold – it is thought that only around a third of his original output has survived. Aristotle, whose means the best purpose, was born in 384 BC in Stagira, Chalcidice. His father Nicomachus was the physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. Aristotle was orphaned at a young age, although there is little information on Aristotles childhood, he probably spent some time within the Macedonian palace, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Platos Academy and he remained there for nearly twenty years before leaving Athens in 348/47 BC. Aristotle then accompanied Xenocrates to the court of his friend Hermias of Atarneus in Asia Minor, there, he traveled with Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos, where together they researched the botany and zoology of the island. Aristotle married Pythias, either Hermiass adoptive daughter or niece and she bore him a daughter, whom they also named Pythias. Soon after Hermias death, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander in 343 BC, Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During that time he gave not only to Alexander
41.
Celestial spheres
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The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others. Since it was believed that the stars did not change their positions relative to one another. In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space, when scholars applied Ptolemys epicycles, they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them. In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC, all these wheel rims had originally been formed out of an original sphere of fire wholly encompassing the Earth, which had disintegrated into many individual rings. Hence, in Anaximanderss cosmogony, in the beginning was the sphere, out of which celestial rings were formed, as viewed from the Earth, the ring of the Sun was highest, that of the Moon was lower, and the sphere of the stars was lowest. Following Anaximander, his pupil Anaximenes held that the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are all made of fire. But whilst the stars are fastened on a crystal sphere like nails or studs, the Sun, Moon, and planets. And unlike Anaximander, he relegated the fixed stars to the region most distant from the Earth, after Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical. And much later in the fourth century BC Platos Timaeus proposed that the body of the cosmos was made in the most perfect and uniform shape, but it posited that the planets were spherical bodies set in rotating bands or rings rather than wheel rims as in Anaximanders cosmology. Each planet is attached to the innermost of its own set of spheres. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle developed a cosmology of spheres. Aristotle considers that these spheres are made of a fifth element. Each of these concentric spheres is moved by its own god—an unchanging divine unmoved mover, by using eccentrics and epicycles, his geometrical model achieved greater mathematical detail and predictive accuracy than had been exhibited by earlier concentric spherical models of the cosmos. In Ptolemys physical model, each planet is contained in two or more spheres, but in Book 2 of his Planetary Hypotheses Ptolemy depicted thick circular slices rather than spheres as in its Book 1. The planetary spheres were arranged outwards from the spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe in order, the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter. In more detailed models the seven planetary spheres contained other secondary spheres within them, in antiquity the order of the lower planets was not universally agreed. Plato and his followers ordered them Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, a series of astronomers, beginning with the Muslim astronomer al-Farghānī, used the Ptolemaic model of nesting spheres to compute distances to the stars and planetary spheres. Al-Farghānīs distance to the stars was 20,110 Earth radii which, on the assumption that the radius of the Earth was 3,250 miles, came to 65,357,500 miles
42.
Fire (classical element)
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Fire has been an important part of all cultures and religions from pre-history to modern day and was vital to the development of civilization. It has been regarded in many different contexts throughout history, Fire is one of the four classical elements in ancient Greek philosophy and science. It was commonly associated with the qualities of energy, assertiveness, in one Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods to protect the otherwise helpless humans, but was punished for this charity. Fire was one of many proposed by the Pre-socratics, most of whom sought to reduce the cosmos, or its creation. Heraclitus considered fire to be the most fundamental of all elements and he believed fire gave rise to the other three elements, All things are an interchange for fire, and fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods. He had a reputation for obscure philosophical principles and for speaking in riddles and this is a concept that anticipates both the four classical elements of Empedocles and Aristotles transmutation of the four elements into one another. This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was and will be, an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out. Heraclitus regarded the soul as being a mixture of fire and water, with fire being the noble part. He believed the goal of the soul is to be rid of water and become pure fire and he was known as the weeping philosopher and died of hydropsy, a swelling due to abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin. However, Empedocles of Acragas, is best known for having selected all elements as his archai and by the time of Plato, the four Empedoclian elements were well established. This also makes fire the element with the smallest number of sides, and Plato regarded it as appropriate for the heat of fire, which he felt is sharp and stabbing. Fire the hot and dry element, like the elements, was an abstract principle and not identical with the normal solids, liquids and combustion phenomena we experience. According to Aristotle, the four elements rise or fall toward their natural place in concentric layers surrounding the center of the earth, in ancient Greek medicine, each of the four humours became associated with an element. Yellow bile was the humor identified with fire, since both were hot and dry, in alchemy the chemical element of sulfur was often associated with fire and its alchemical symbol and its symbol was an upward-pointing triangle. In alchemic tradition, metals are incubated by fire in the womb of the Earth, Agni is a Hindu and Vedic deity. The word agni is Sanskrit for fire, cognate with Latin ignis, Russian огонь, Agni has three forms, fire, lightning and the sun. Agni is one of the most important of the Vedic gods and he is the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. The sacrifices made to Agni go to the deities because Agni is a messenger from and he is ever-young, because the fire is re-lit every day, yet he is also immortal
43.
Plato
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Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Platos entire work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead once noted, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. In addition to being a figure for Western science, philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, amongst other scholars, called Christianity, Platonism for the people, Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy, which originate with him. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied, few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range, perhaps only Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank. Due to a lack of surviving accounts, little is known about Platos early life, the philosopher came from one of the wealthiest and most politically active families in Athens. Ancient sources describe him as a bright though modest boy who excelled in his studies, the exact time and place of Platos birth are unknown, but it is certain that he belonged to an aristocratic and influential family. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars believe that he was born in Athens or Aegina between 429 and 423 BCE. According to a tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus. Platos mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker, besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children, these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus. The brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon are mentioned in the Republic as sons of Ariston, and presumably brothers of Plato, but in a scenario in the Memorabilia, Xenophon confused the issue by presenting a Glaucon much younger than Plato. Then, at twenty-eight, Hermodorus says, went to Euclides in Megara, as Debra Nails argues, The text itself gives no reason to infer that Plato left immediately for Megara and implies the very opposite. Thus, Nails dates Platos birth to 424/423, another legend related that, when Plato was an infant, bees settled on his lips while he was sleeping, an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse about philosophy. Ariston appears to have died in Platos childhood, although the dating of his death is difficult. Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mothers brother, who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was famous for his beauty. Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes second son, Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato and these and other references suggest a considerable amount of family pride and enable us to reconstruct Platos family tree
, Bibcode:1998AIPC..423..236B, doi:10.1063/1.55085, ISBN 1-56396-725-1
