The Solar Eclipse 2017

Welcome back to The Mysterious Cosmos, ever wondered why does an eclipse occur? Is there someone playing with the planets? Or is there some magical force driving the heavenly bodies or it is just the way our universe works.

On 21 July 2017 the U.S.A observed a Total Solar Eclipse, one of the most beautiful phenomenon the nature portrays before us. It is magnificent, it is fascinating...... well the phenomenon can not be explained by words!

Eclipse as seen from the GIII aircraft!

    Well a Solar Eclipse is a Transit of The Moon ( for  more on transit visit : Mercury Transit) such  that the Moon comes between the Earth and Sun. Well now some of you may question that this also happens during a new moon which happens every month so the solar eclipse should also occur monthly? The answer to it is simple, here's how it goes.

Think of the Sun and the Earth as to points on a line and since they lie on a line we call it as the Earth-Sun plane. Now imagine that an ellipse is drawn around the plane such that it intersects it at two points( remember now we are taking about 3d plane) which we call nodes and a eclipse will occur only at nodal intersections. So at a nodal position when Moon is between Earth and Sun we call it a solar eclipse while lunar eclipse occurs when the earth is between the two and then? boom xD

The geometry of an eclipse.

Here comes one more interesting thing , we know that the Sun is huge, very very huge so how does the Moon covers the Sun totally? Well it seems nature has found its own way to make an eclipse, we know that the Sun is 400x the Moon but also it is 400x away from the Earth which causes their apparent size to be the same and thus boom again xD and we get a Solar Eclipse!

By: Aviral Srivasatava, Founder, Author at The Mysterious Cosmos

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Indian Astronomy

Planet Nine

                                                  

A new planet out there?

Planet NIne!. doesn't the term sound familiar? Well some of you would think about pluto, right? But unfortunately that fuzzy round ball isn't a planet anymore. The new Planet Nine(which hasn't been discovered yet xD) is actually a hypothetical body which had to exist because of drastic changes occurring in Neptune's orbit. 

The planet looks beautiful indeed?

So our scientists all being full of questions worked out with their mathematics and came up with this  so called "Planet Nine" I wrote about this sometime ago(check out here). So it old news now? But wait there, what now! Well a few months ago a project on Zooniverse started
with enrollment of common people like us to help the researchers find out if this object existed. 

So 60,000 people from all over the globe contributed to it and studied 4 million objects! out of which only 4 are candidates for Planet Nine! I too contributed to it, it was fun!

Mysterious indeed? And if we find this it would be a breakthrough because we haven't found one in our own solar system since more than a century. So wait for it and stay connected to us, our community will keep you updated.

By: Aviral Srivasatava, Founder, Author at The Mysterious Cosmos

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