Aestus Ajith

The Sun, as seen from one of the Moon of Uranus, Ron Miller   Our Solar System is a seriously beautiful place. Whether it’s the pockmarked volcanic surface of  Mercury , the dusty crimson plains of  Mars , the beautiful rings of  Saturn , or even the blues and viridians of our  own world , it’s a diverse place full of remarkable sights and natural wonders. We’d be nowhere without the Sun, mind you, and a series of truly stunning visualizations of our local star – as seen from each planet, and poor demoted Pluto – by artist and illustrator  Ron Miller  serve to remind you of this fact. He’s spent more than 40 years illustrating the dark realms of space, both near and far, and has come up with the most realistic depictions of the Sun as seen from these far-flung worlds as possible. “I've taken care in not only making sure the Sun is depicted realistically, but also the surfaces of the planets and satellites as well,” Miller...

Humans may have thought they mastered the flame back in the Stone Age, but hundreds of thousands of years later and fire is still a cause of fascination and confusion. Scientists from the University of Maryland have described a previously unobserved form of fire in a study published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Dubbed the “blue whirl”, the flame glows nearly completely blue and rapidly spins on top of a water’s surface. “Blue whirls evolve from traditional yellow fire whirls,” Elaine Oran, Glenn L. Martin Institute professor of engineering and co-author of the paper, explained in  a statement . “The yellow color is due to radiating soot particles, which form when there is not enough oxygen to burn the fuel completely. Blue in the whirl indicates there is enough oxygen for complete combustion, which means less or no soot, and is therefore a cleaner burn.” But this blue whirl doesn’t just make for a pretty pictur...

An international team hunt for the origins of dog domestication. Performing a medical procedure on a live animal isn’t for a faint hearted researcher. So when a village dog in rural India bit Ryan Boyko’s thumb, he figured it was a small price to pay (although he got a tetanus shot to be safe) for the opportunity to explore some of the big questions of dog lovers — when and where did that special relationship between dog and human begin? To answer these questions, Boyko and an international team of collaborators, led by his brother Professor Adam Boyko from  Cornell University  in Ithaca, New York, took on a project that would make most vets blanch: to collect blood from 549 village dogs across 38 countries. The aim was to map the dogs’ genetic relationships and through that, trace the history of dog domestication. Boyko, the CEO of dog DNA testing company, Embark Veterinary Inc, wanted to know “what makes dogs dogs and to what extent does that help us understand what ...

Albert Einstein , one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, forever changed the landscape of science by introducing revolutionary concepts that shook our understanding of the physical world. One of Einstein's most defining qualities was his remarkable ability to conceptualise complex scientific ideas by imagining real-life scenarios. He called these scenarios  " Gedankenexperiments ",  which is German for "thought experiments". Here are a few thought experiments that demonstrate some of Einstein's most ground-breaking discoveries. Imagine you're chasing a beam of a light. This is something Einstein  started thinking about when he was just 16 years old . What would happen if you chased a beam of light as it moved through space? If you could somehow catch up to the light, Einstein reasoned, you would be able to observe the light frozen in space. But light can't be frozen in space, otherwise it would cease to be light. Eventually Eins...

Nearly 50 years after  landing on the Moon , mankind has now set its sights on sending the  first humans to Mars . The Moon trip  took three days ; a Mars trip will likely take  most of a year . The difference is in more than just time. We’ll need many more supplies for the trip itself, and when we get to the Red Planet, we’re going to need to set up camp and stay for a while. Carrying all this material will require a revolutionary rocket technology. The  Saturn V  was the largest rocket ever built. It consumed an enormous amount of fuel in explosive chemical reactions that propelled the Apollo spacecraft into orbit. After reaching orbit, Apollo ejected the empty fuel tanks and turned on its own chemical rockets that used even more fuel to get to the Moon. It took  nearly a million gallons  (3.7 million litres) of various fuels just to send a few people on a day trip to our nearest extraterrestrial body. So how could we send a settlement...

Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, gas giant, and  subject of the Juno mission , is huge.  Huge . It's so huge, in fact, that it doesn't actually orbit the Sun. Not exactly. With 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, it's big enough that the centre of gravity between Jupiter and the Sun doesn't actually reside inside the Sun – rather, at a point in space just above the Sun's surface. Here's how that works. When a small object orbits a big object in space, the less massive one doesn't really travel in a perfect circle around the larger one. Rather, both objects orbit a combined centre of gravity. In situations we're familiar with – like Earth orbiting the much-larger Sun – the centre of gravity resides so close to the centre of the larger object that the impact of this phenomenon is negligible. The bigger object doesn't seem to move, and the smaller one draws a circle around it. But reality is alway...

Taking a long trip can occasionally feel like playing Russian roulette with my body. Sometimes I recover quickly and barely seem to notice the time difference, and other times I'm exhausted for days. No matter how long it lasts, jet lag is never fun, and researchers still haven't found a 'cure' for the bothersome side-effect. But they have uncovered a new piece of the puzzle about what causes jet lag - and it could help ease the pain of your next globe-trot. It turns out that our internal clocks are a bit laggy - they run a tad longer than 24 hours. That makes westward travel easier since it involves simply adjusting to a slightly longer day. Travelling east, on the other hand, is much tougher for the body to handle. So what's the best way to help convince your internal time-keeper (local time: confused o'clock) to run on the same schedule as your external clock, or the local time at your destination? Sunlight. To get a closer look at what's go...

It’s one of the most fundamental compounds on Earth, and it makes up roughly  60 percent of the human body,  and yet water is turning out to be stranger than we could have ever imagined. Researchers have been investigating the physical properties of water, and found that when it’s heated to between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius, it hits a 'crossover temperature', and appears to start switching between two different states of liquid. As a chemical compound, water is so vital to life on Earth, we’ve been underestimating how legitimately weird it is. We’ve all gotten so used to it, it’s hard to imagine things getting any more complex than the three basic states: solid, liquid, gas. (Under very rare circumstances, a  plasma-like state  can also form.) But in many ways, plain, old water is unlike any other substance on the planet.  With the exception of Mercury, water has the  highest surface tension of all liquids . It’s also one of the only known subst...

For the first time, physicists have observed a strange molecule called the butterfly  Rydberg molecule  - a weak pairing of highly excitable atoms that was first predicted  back in 2002 . The find not only confirms a 14-year-old prediction - it also confirms the existence of a whole new type of atomic bond.  Rydberg molecules  form when an electron is kicked far from an atom's nucleus, making them super electronically excited. On their own, they're common enough. But  back in 2002,  a team of researchers from Purdue University in Indiana predicted that a Rydberg molecule could attract and bind to another atom - something that was thought impossible according to our understanding of how  atoms bind at the time . They called that hypothetical molecule combination the butterfly Rydberg molecule, because of the butterfly-like distribution of the orbiting electrons. And now, 14 years later, the same team has finally observed a butterfl...