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Showing posts from September, 2013

Pulsars and the Ooty Radio Telescope

Well, there's enough content about Quasars on my blog. It's about time i talked about Pulsars - though they sound similar, they are in no way related to one another! Simply put, Pulsars are a Galactic phenomenon i.e they are found in the Milky way galaxy and Quasars are an Extra-Galactic phenomenon i.e they are found in galaxies outside out own galaxy - the Milky way galaxy!  And, pardon the technical jargon, Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars which emit radiation from their polar regions. And since their spin axis is different from their magnetic axis, the radiation is perceived/observed only when the magnetic axis is aligned to our line of sight!  Basically, a Pulsar is like a light house. Light is only observed periodically and if you're not standing right in the place - you might not be able to observe it! In the case of the Pulsar, the cone of light is much smaller and the period of the pulses is very small - of the other of milli seconds.  I was

Magnetic Bottles.

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Okay, firstly, sorry for not having posted in the last month or so. I'm just sending this apology into the vast expenses of the world wide web as i don't really know who follows my blog and who doesn't. Y'all need to comment more and give me feedback! And I promised myself last summer that the only articles on this blog will be ones on science or at the very least related to the pursuit science and technology. And lately, I have been a bit involved with my course work and the like. So, I was looking for the right topic to blog on. And whatdoyaknow, I stopped looking for the right topic and started making a topic the right one! So, here is something interesting I learnt a couple of weeks back. As part of a course on Radiative Processes in Astrophysics here at IIT Madras, I was studying the behavior of particles in uniform Electric and Magnetic fields. Something most of us studied during our 12th and maybe in a bit more detail in college, if you pursued science i.e. An