A new game plan

Based on what I mentioned a couple of days back, I'm now trying to put together the basics of programming in C and Fortran, for a course I'm doing this semester. Pretty much most of my evening was spent on those snippets on how to code, compile and debug. Earlier I attended a popular science talk by Prof. Sriram on how supernovae were used to discover an accelerating expansion of the universe. He introduced the concept of the cosmic distance ladder and he talked about how supernova, of a specific kind, can act as standard candles, that can be used to measure distances to far away galaxies.

And I had an idea for another interesting side project. Well, I already had the idea like an year back but never took it up seriously. I wanted to understand how a random distribution of particles end up on a plane, look at the milky way galaxy. There should be a way to analytically solve and understand where such a plane might lie. It would also be an interesting visualization to show an n-body system, governed only by gravity, collapse to a disk over time. Penned down and cataloged!

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