future of the universe

                           Pointing telescopes into the heavens is not merely an arbitrary practice used to study our surroundings. It is much more than that. Not only does it give us the ability to study the very laws of physics that keep the Earth in rotation around the Sun, ultimately giving way to the development of multicellular life-forms, but it also serves as some sort of a  allowing us to look back at  some of the very first celestial objects created after the dawn of time.

In addition to that, we are able to determine the rate at which the universe is expanding, see stars be born and die in equal proportions, detect changes in the atmosphere of distant exoplanets and so much more, making it somewhat difficult to determine which portions are the most important. ‘ However, it has been said that due to the accelerating  expansion of the universe, the very sky we’re observing today will look radically different from the one that’ll exist in a few billions or trillions of year from now we look at our Milky Way galaxy (or other galaxies) from an overall point of view, we find that much of its light -- perhaps more than half -- comes from a relatively few stars: massive, blue, young stars, less than one billion years old, emit huge amounts of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared radiation. They are often grouped together into star-forming regions, sometimes lighting up gas in their vicinity to form HII regions.

Spiral galaxies may remind you of a pinwheel. They are rotating disks of mostly hydrogen gas, dust and stars. Through a telescope or binoculars, the bright nucleus of the galaxy may be visible but the spiral arms are dimmer and difficult to see.

Spiral galaxies are complex objects and have several components: a disk, a bulge, and a halo. The disk contains gas, dust, and young stars in its spiral arms. The dense bulge in the center of the disk contains mostly old stars and no gas or dust. The halo is the home of a very few, scattered stars and . The halo is also the home of dark matter in spiral galaxies.

Spirals are subdivided based on the appearance of the arms and the central region. Saw types have a large, bright central region and tightly wound arms, while Sc types have a smaller central region and loosely wound arms. Sb types are somewhere in between. Spiral galaxies can also have bar-like structures through them. These galaxies are classified as SB.

Galaxies like to live together in groups called clusters. There are not many of spirals in a cluster usually, but they are more common than in the regions between clusters. 

The star Algol takes its name from an Arabic word meaning “the Demon’s Head.” This star is said to depict the terrifying snake-y head of the Medusa monster.In the mythology of the skies, Perseus – a great hero often depicted mounted on Pegasus the Flying Horse – used Medusa’s head to his own advantage – to turn Cetus the Sea-monster into stone. Perhaps the ancients associated this star’s variable brightness with the evil, winking eye of the Medusa.

Algol brightens and dims with clockwork regularity, completing one cycle in 2 days, 20 hours, and 49 minutes. Moreover, this variable star is easy to observe with just the unaided eye. At its brightest, Algol shines about three times more brightly than at its faintest. At maximum brilliance, Algol matches the brightness of the nearby second-magnitude star Almach. At minimum, Algol’s light output fades to that of the star Epsilon Persei.

kepler is the new planets

Kepler is the first spacecraft capable of discovering Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of distant stars. ESA’s CoRoT spacecraft is finding “super-Earths” which are planets several times the mass of Earth. CoRoT’s planets are in short period orbits, which means that the planets are close to their stars and are high temperature orbs. The latest CoRoT discovery is roughly twice the size of Earth. Ground-based telescopes search for exo-planets using spectroscopy, and have discovered a bounty of giant planets. More than 340 planets have been discovered, including 37 systems with multiple planets. Altogether, planets have been found orbiting more than 280 nearby stars. Amazing!So far, planets as small as Earth have not been found. The Kepler mission is specifically designed to search for Earths in the habitable zone of other stars. This will take time. One transit is not sufficient. Discoveries must be confirmed by at least two additional transits, for a minimum of three transits. For a planet like Earth in orbit around a Sun-like star, the transits would be about a year apart. Thus, confirmation would require three years. The initial observation period for Kepler is 3.5 years, and it may be extended.

3:24 AM

 

about a solar system

Solar Energy a clean renewable resource with zero emission, has got tremendous potential of energy which can be harnessed using a variety of devices. With recent developments, solar energy systems are easily available for industrial and domestic use with the added advantage of minimum maintenance. Solar energy could be made financially viable with government tax incentives and rebates. Most of the developed countries are switching over to solar energy as one of the prime renewable energy source. The current architectural designs make provision for photovoltaic cells and necessary circuitry while making building plans. The National Solar Mission is a major initiative of the Government of India and State Governments to promote ecologically sustainable growth while addressing India’s energy security challenge. It will also constitute a major contribution by India to the global effort to meet the challenges of climate change. The objective of the National Solar Mission is to establish India as a global leader in solar energy, by creating the policy conditions for its diffusion across the country as quickly as possible. The immediate aim of the Mission is to focus on setting up an enabling environment for solar technology penetration in the country both at a centralized and decentralized level. The National Action Plan on Climate Change also points out: “India is a tropical country, where sunshine is available for longer hours per day and in great intensity. Solar energy, therefore, has great potential as future energy source. It also has the advantage of permitting the decentralized distribution of energy, thereby empowering people at the grassroots level.

India is facing an acute energy scarcity which is hampering its industrial growth and economic progress. Setting up of new power plants is inevitably dependent on import of highly volatile fossil fuels. Thus, it is essential to tackle the energy crisis through judicious utilization of abundant the renewable energy resources, such as Biomass Energy solar Energy, Wind Energy and Geothermal Energy. Apart from augmenting the energy supply, renewable resources will help India in mitigating climate change. India is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for its energy needs. Most of the power generation is carried out by coal and mineral oil-based power plants which contribute heavily to greenhouse gases emission. Solar Power a clean renewable resource with zero emission, has got tremendous potential of energy which can be harnessed using a variety of devices. With recent developments, solar energy systems are easily available for industrial and domestic use with the added advantage of minimum maintenance. Solar energy could be made financially viable with government tax incentives and rebates. Most of the developed countries are switching over to solar energy as one of the prime renewable energy source. The current architectural designs make provision for photovoltaic cells and necessary circuitry while making building plans. Because of its location between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, India has an average annual temperature that ranges from 25°C – 27.5 °C. This means that India has huge solar potential. The sunniest parts are situated in the south/east coast, from Calcutta to Madras.

This included the Silicon and PV manufacturing industry as well. New manufacturers like Titan Energy Systems, Indo Solar Limited and KSK Surya Photovoltaic Venture Private Limited took advantage of the Special Incentive Scheme included in this policy and constructed plants for PV modules. This move helped the manufacturing industry to grow, but a majority of the production was still being exported. There were no PV projects being developed in India at that stage. There was also a need for a policy to incorporate solar power into the grid. The Generation Based Incentive (GBI) scheme, announced in January 2008 was the first step by the government to promote grid connected solar power plants. The scheme for the first time defined a feed-in tariff (FIT) for solar power (a maximum of Rs. 15/kWh). Since the generation cost of solar power was then still around Rs. 18/kWh, the tariff offered was unviable. Also, under the GBI scheme, a developer could not install more than 5MW of solar power in India, which limited the returns from scale. One of the main drawbacks of the GBI scheme was that it failed to incorporate the state utilities and the government in the project development, leaving problems like land acquisitions and grid availability unaddressed. As a result, despite the GBI scheme, installed capacity in India grew only marginally to 6MW by 2009. In June 2008, the Indian government announced the National Action Plan for Climate Change (NAPCC). A part of that plan was the National Solar Mission (NSM). The NSM guidelines indicated that the government had improved on the shortcomings of the GBI scheme. It aimed to develop a solar industry, which was commercially driven and based on a strong domestic industry. The extra cost of generation of solar power was being borne by the federal government under the GBI scheme.

India has a great potential to generate electricity from solar energy and the Country is on course to emerge as a solar energy hub. The techno-commercial potential of photovoltaics in India is enormous. With GDP growing in excess of 8%, the energy ‘gap’ between supply and demand will only widen. Solar PV is a renewable energy resource capable of bridging this ‘gap’. Most parts of India have 300 – 330 sunny days in a year, which is equivalent to over 5000 trillion kWh per year – more than India’s total energy consumption per year. Average solar incidence stands at a robust 4 – 7 kWh/sq.meter/day. About 66 MW of aggregate capacity is installed for various applications comprising one million industrial PV systems – 80% of which is solar lanterns, home/street lighting systems and solar water pumps, etc. The estimated potential envisaged by the Ministry for the solar PV programme, i.e. solar street/home lighting systems, solar lanterns is 20 MW/sq. kilometer. The potential of the solar thermal sector in India also remains untapped. The Ministry of Renewable Energy proposes an addition of 500 MW during the phase 1 of JNNSM. Establishing manufacturing units at Export Oriented Units, SEZs or under the SIPS programme presents a good opportunity for firms which can leverage India’s cost advantage to export solar modules at competitive prices to markets in Europe and the United States. In terms of all renewable energy, currently India is ranked fifth in the world with 15,691.4 MW grid-connected and 367.9 MW off-grid renewable energy based power capacity. India is among top 5 destinations worldwide for solar energy development as per Ernst & Young’s renewable energy attractiveness index. Solar power is attractive because it is abundant and offers a solution to fossil fuel emissions and global climate change. Earth receives solar energy at the rate of approximately 1,73,000 TW.

 This enormously exceeds both the current annual global energy consumption rate of about 15 TW, and any conceivable requirement in the future. India is both densely populated and has high solar insolation, providing an ideal combination for solar power in India. India is already a leader in wind power generation. In solar energy sector, some large projects have been proposed, and a 35,000 km² area of the Thar Desert has been set aside for solar power projects, sufficient to generate 700 to 2,100 GW. The India Energy Portal estimates that if 10% of the land were used for harnessing solar energy, the installed solar capacity would be at 8,000GW, or around fifty times the current total installed power capacity in the country. For example, even assuming 10% conversion efficiency for PV modules, it will still be thousand times greater than the likely electricity demand in India by the year 2015. Daytime production peak coincides with peak electricity demand making solar ideal supplement to grid. With around 300 sunny days a year nationwide, solar energy’s potential in India is immense. And with $10.2 billion investments in clean energy, money is starting to follow the opportunity. India received $95 million in venture-capital funding and over $1.1 billion in large-scale funding for solar projects in 2011, according to a report by Mercom Capital, a clean-energy consulting firm. The biggest funding deal was a $694 million loan raised by Maharashtra State Power Generation Co. for its 150-MW Dhule and 125-MW Sakri solar projects. 

Solar thermal electricity technologies produce electric power by converting the sun’s energy into hightemperature heat using various mirror configurations, which is then channeled to an on-site power plant and used to make electricity through traditional heat-conversion technologies. The plant essentially consists of two parts; one that collects Solar energy and converts it to heat, and another that converts the heat energy to electricity.

 A solar cell is a semiconductor device that transforms sunlight into electricity. Semiconductor material is placed between two electrodes. When sunshine reaches the cell, free negatively charged electrons are discharged from the material, enabling conversion to electricity. This is the so-called photovoltaic effect. In theory, a solar cell made from one semiconductor material only can convert about 30 percent of the solar radiation energy it is exposed to into electricity. Commercial cells today, depending on technology, typically have an efficiency of 5 - 12 percent for thin films and 13 – 21 percent for crystalline silicon based cells. Efficiencies up to 25 percent have been reached by the use of laboratory processes. By using multiple solar cells, efficiencies above 35 percent have been achieved. 7.2. SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAICS – Photovoltaic has been derived from the combination of two words, Photo means Light and Voltaic means electricity. It is a technology that converts light directly into electricity. Photovoltaic material, most commonly utilizing highly-purified silicon, converts sunlight directly into electricity.

 Lack of electricity infrastructure is one of the main hurdles in the development of rural India. India’s grid system is considerably under-developed, with major sections of its populace still surviving off-grid. As of 2004 there are about 80,000 unelectrified villages in the country. Of these villages, 18,000 could not be electrified through extension of the conventional grid. A target for electrifying 5,000 such villages was fixed for the Tenth National Five Year Plan (2002–2007). As on 2004, more than 2,700 villages and hamlets had been electrified mainly using SPV systems. Developments on cheap solar technology are considered as a potential alternative that allows an electricity infrastructure comprising of a network of local-grid clusters with distributed electricity generation. That could allow bypassing, or at least relieving the need of installing expensive, and lossy, long-distance centralised power delivery systems and yet bring cheap electricity to the masses.3000 villages of Odissa will be lighted with Solar power by 2014. The off-grid and rooftop segments will grow exponentially as price parity with consumer tariffs makes solar power an economically viable alternative, particularly for urban and semi-urban consumers.

The solar industry's structure will rapidly evolve as solar reaches grid parity with conventional power between 2016 and 2018. Solar will be seen more as a viable energy source, not just as an alternative to other renewable sources but also to a significant proportion of conventional grid power. The testing and refinement of off-grid and rooftop solar models in the seed phase will help lead to the explosive growth of this segment in the growth phase. Global prices for photovoltaic (PV) modules are dropping, reducing the overall cost of generating solar power. In India, this led to a steep decline in the winning bids for JNNSM projects. With average prices of 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), solar costs in India are already among the world's lowest. Given overcapacity in the module industry, prices will likely continue falling over the next four years before leveling off. By 2016, the cost of solar power could be as much as 15 percent lower than that of the most expensive grid-connected conventional energy suppliers. The capacity of those suppliers alone, nearly 8 GW in conventional terms, corresponds to solar equivalent generation capacity potential of 25 to 30 GW. Due to implementation challenges, however, it's unlikely that all of this potential will be realized by 2016. Grid parity will be an inflection point, leading to two major shifts in the solar market. First, thanks to favorable project economics, grid-connected capacity will rise at a much faster rate than before, and second, regulations and policy measures will be refined to promote off-grid generation. According to one estimates, the combination of electricity demand growth, fossil fuel cost and availability challenges, and supportive environmental regulations could increase solar power capacity to more than 50 GW by 2022. The market will see a significant change after 2016. Lower solar costs combined with rising prices of grid power will convince offtakers (including distribution companies, private firms using open access, and firms putting up their own captive capacity) that solar power is economically viable. This shift will signal the start of the growth phase, during which grid-connected solar capacity will rise rapidly to about 35 GW by 2020 as developers build capacity to meet both RPO requirements and demand from offtakers seeking cost-efficient alternatives to conventional power.

12:16 AM