>> Thursday, January 6, 2011
National Space Agency (ANGKASA) is proudly present to you a brand New program coming New Year 2011. This program is known as “Ideas for Try Zero G in Space”. The program is actually the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) educational program in the International Space Station (ISS). The purpose of this program is to show the difference of science phenomenon between 0G (in ISS) and 1G (on Earth) for educational purpose. Astronaut who stay in ISS will demonstrate the educational activity according to the experimental procedure proposed by teachers or students and it will be recorded by the High Definition video camera. The coming next Ideas for Try Zero G in Space experiments will be attempted by astronaut Furukawa during his long stay mission in Japanese experiment module, KIBO on the ISS around March 2011. Therefore ANGKASA & JAXA are working together to look for ideas from you!
How? Well, it’s easy, all you have to do is to come up with an idea (or perhaps more ideas) of the basic science experiment with some simple and easy understand explanation on its procedure as well as the expected outcome. The experiment must be simple, easy to understand by children and easy to be carried out by Japanese Astronaut Furukawa during his next long stay mission in Japanese experiment module, Kibo on the ISS. Then send us you ideas by filling up the application form (attach together with this email) and send it (via postal mail, email, fax or website) to ANGKASA by 25 January 2011 (Tuesday) before 5pm. I know time is too short but why not give it a try, who knows your ideas maybe selected for next year “Ideas for Try Zero G in Space”.
More details about this program can be found in “Ideas for Try Zero G in Space.pdf”. Please be informed that we are currently working on updating our website for the details information of this program with some useful links to the experimental videos recorded previously by JAXA. So stay tune and check up our website frequently for the next two or three to get more inspiration to create your own unique and novel ideas.
Please do not hesitate to contact me (lau@angkasa.gov.my) or my colleagues Mr. Jong Tze Kian (ltkjong@angkasa.gov.my) or Ms Nur’ Fazilah (fazilah@angkasa.gov.my) if you have any queries.
Thank you for your attention.
Best regards
Lau Chen Chen
Research Officer
National Space Agency (ANGKASA)
National Planetarium
Lot 53, Jalan Perdana
50480 Kuala Lumpur
Tel : 03 – 2273 4303/ 5484 Fax : 03 – 2273 5488
Website : www.angkasa.gov.my/planetarium
LASER
>> Sunday, November 14, 2010
Today, lasers can be found almost everywhere, from telephone lines to cutting edge scientific research, supermarket scanners, and even cat toys.The first laser light was produced on May 16, 1960 at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu, California when Theodore Maiman switched on his fist-sized device that flashed a bright red spot onto a photo-detector. Since then, lasers have become smaller, more powerful, and ubiquitous in modern technology.
Lasers have had an especially big impact on information technology. Sending data using digitized laser light signals over fiber optics has revolutionized the transfer of data. The IBM Roadrunner, the world's second fastest supercomputer, has over 45,000 lasers used for sending data across its 133,000 processing cores. Likewise, fiber optics make up the backbone of the Internet as nearly all data runs on fiber optic lines.
Read more...
The Sun
>> Friday, September 3, 2010
Fact about The sun
1. The age of the Sun is about 4.5 billion years. The location of Sun in Our solar system is on the edge of a spiral arm called Orion's Arm, and is one-half to two-thirds of the way (28,000 light-years) from the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Sun, an ordinary star, contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of our solar system. The amount of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth's atmosphere (known as the Solar constant) is equivalent to 1.37 kw of electricity per square metre
The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun
The Sun is our closest star and the centre of the Solar System. It is around four and a half thousand million years old and in 6 thousand million years or so, it is predicted that it will reach the end of its life (more on that further down). Currently however, it is an 'average' sized star, classified as a G2 type main sequence star. These can be found quite abundantly throughout the visible universe.
However, don't let this apparent 'normalness' of the Sun's size in comparison with other stars fool you - compared with anything else in our solar system, it is absolutely superlative. To give you an idea of its size, it has 333,400 times more mass than the Earth and contains 99.86% of the mass of the entire Solar System - this means Jupiter and all the other planets and asteroids put together only account for 0.14% of the mass of the Solar System. The Sun's core is so hot and dense that just a pinhead of its material could kill a person 160 kilometres away.
Every second the Sun loses 4.5 million tonnes of material, blown off to space - this means that in 42 million years it would lose enough material to make the Earth. However this high loss rate of mass is really rather insignificant when compared to the total mass of the Sun - over the past 4,500 million years it has barely lost a few hundredths of a percent of its total mass. Interestingly, all the light we see from the Sun comes from a layer 500km deep (the top 0.1%) and takes about 8.3 minutes to reach us down here on Earth. By contrast, radiation from its core takes about 170,000 years to make its way out to the surface, due to the high density of the mass it must travel through.
Viewed from the surface of the Earth, to normal human beings the Sun appears to be a simple, round uniform yellow ball. When observed in detail however, as the pictures show, this is far from being the case. In reality it has several well-defined layers leading up its surface, and above its surface it even has what could be termed it's atmosphere - the mystifyingly scorching hot solar corona.
An imaginary solar 'tourist', travelling out from the centre of the Sun, would begin his journey at a sweltering 15.6million°K in the core, gradually decreasing as he got further from the centre, eventually reaching just 5780 or so Kelvins in the photosphere - the Sun's 'surface'. However, the temperature would then begin to increase as he progresses through the Chromosphere, up to 10,000K, culminating in an a massive 1 million K (or higher) in the corona! The exact reason for this unexpectedly high temperature in the corona is still unknown, though recent research has ascertained that the energy needed to heat the corona to such high temperatures is somehow provided by the Sun's vast magnetic field.
The Sun was born, as mentioned earlier, about 4.5 thousand million years ago. Like all stars, it was formed when a cloud of gas of at least 100 Solar Masses, floating around the galaxy, got squeezed by an outside influence (e.g. a nearby supernova explosion or the pressure of a passing spiral arm of the galaxy) and started to collapse. After a while, the cloud (or 'nebula') would have reached a point at which it continued collapsing under its own weight, breaking up in the process to form many different stars. As the part that was to be the Sun collapsed further, it became more and more dense and increased in temperature. Under the increasingly strong influence of a central gravitational force, the mass would soon have formed a spherical shape, and when the temperature in the centre reached about 15 million°C, it got hot enough for nuclear reactions to start. The outward force created by these reactions acted as a stabilizing influence on the star, preventing further collapse, so the star eventually reached an equilibrium.
Nuclear Fusion
The Sun is now a stable star, though gradually increasing in luminosity. It is presently 'burning' hydrogen in its core, converting it into Helium by a nuclear fusion process. And here's where the extremely high temperature and pressure present in the core of the Sun comes in, for these conditions make it impossible for whole atoms to exist - instead the protons and electrons forming atoms are free to move sperately, thereby forming a plasma in the Solar core. The immense pressure of the Sun's weight then acts to push the protons and electrons closer together than they would be normally, and eventually to fuse together 4 Hydrogen nuclei (ie 4 protons), in a number of stages,
to end up with 1 helium nucleus (ie 2 protons and 2 neutrons).
However, the Helium nucleus formed actually contains very slightly less mass than
the 4 protons which formed it. This is because the rest of the mass is converted into pure energy in the ratio E=mc². This simple reaction, occurring on a vast scale inside the Sun's core, produces absolutely vast amounts of energy, and is the source of all electromagnetic radiation (and heat) coming from the Sun.
In fact about 700 million tons of Hydrogen are converted to Helium every second, releasing 5 million tons of pure energy.
The Sun's Future
However nuclear fusion can only keep happening for another four thousand million years or so, when Hydrogen will then run out in the core. When this happens the inner core will shrink and the Sun will expand and get hotter, due to Hydrogen being 'burned' in the outer core, engulfing Mercury and nearly reaching Venus. As it does so, the core will reach a blistering 100 million°C and will begin to burn the Helium there. This will keep the star stable as a 'Red Giant' for a thousand million years or so until the Helium runs out. When this happens, the core will begin collapsing again and it'll get hotter and the star will get bigger once more, expanding to the present orbit of Earth.
At this point, the Sun will be very unstable, expanding and shrinking often and losing a lot of material into space. Soon afterwards, all that will be left will be its inner Carbon core, which, although it will still contain about 2 thirds of the Sun's mass, will be collapsed so much that it will have reached the ultimate density, quantum forces will stop it collapsing further and it'll become a 'White Dwarf' - a small star about the size of the Earth but much denser (about 1cm3 of this stuff would have the mass of a tonne - that's a million times the density of water!)
Majlis Anugerah Cemerlang
>> Sunday, April 25, 2010
Tahniah kepada semua pelajar yang mendapat pelbagai anugerah MAC 2010 terutama kepada 12 orang pelajar yang mendapat fizik A-, A dan A+
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
