SRC Blog

  A cosmic Rose - by Anmol Subba (Physics Dept) In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble's eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. A swath of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light. The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with the companion galaxy. A series of uncommon spiral patterns in the large galaxy is a tell-tale sign of interaction. The large, outer arm appears partially as a ring, a featur

  Forest Fires : Cost of Climate Change By – Sai Prasanna Thapa (Chemistry Dept) According to Wikipedia, climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Caused by natural and human reasons, climate change is a crucial trial marked by life-threatening losses involving humans and landscapes. Rise in sea level and temperature, extended drought periods, abnormal variation in precipitation events, shrunken glaciers etc. are few notable effects of climate change. picture courtesy wikipedia  Climate change is a significant component that elevates the risk of fire in forests. The drying of the organic matter in the forests is augmented by climate change and has increased the number of forest fires between the years 1984 and 2020. Researches confirm that due to an increase in the temperature-creating dry and warm conditions in the Earth-prolongs the life of a wildfire. The U.S. West pro

Riemann Hypothesis and its connection to Prime Numbers. by Ankit Subba (Mathematics Department) Primes are of the utmost importance to number theorists  because they are the building blocks of whole numbers , and important to the world because their odd mathematical properties make them perfect for many uses such as cryptography. One key puzzle facing number theorists is the distribution of primes: There is no known way, other than brute-force computation, to predict exactly where the nth prime number will be or what the distance between two consecutive large primes will be . Considered by many to be the most important unsolved problem in mathematics, the Riemann hypothesis makes precise predictions about the distribution of prime numbers. As the name suggests, it is for now only a conjecture. If proved by you, it would immediately solve many other open problems in number theory, refine our understanding of the behavior of prime numbers and earn you a million dollars as it is millenniu