Tuesday, April 27, 2010

A small perspective

Here is a small perspective on you, me, us, and our planet, earth that we live on. We live on possibly the only planet that seems to have intelligent (pretentious) life forms. And instead of trying to protect it, we are looking to find other life forms. Why? Well possibly to export our destructive powers?

Earth (12600 km), with its satellite Moon (3500 km)

Venus is about the same size as Earth

Suddenly dwarfed in comparison with Neptune and Uranus

Jupiter's diameter is 143,000 km

All pale in comparison with our Sun - 1,392,000 kilometers !

Sun is not the largest star in our galaxy, Sirius something bigger at ~2,500,000km

Pollux is about 8.3 times of Sun

Arcturus is about 31 times the size of Sun.

Aldebaran is 51 times. Sun is a mere dot in this pic.







VV Cephei is about 2400 light years away from Earth

Canis Majoris is ~2000 times our Sun


At this point we, our earth, cannot even be represented. All of this within our Milky Way or nearby galaxy. The Milky Way, Akash Ganga galaxy itself is about 1 million light-years in diameter. The solar system is not at the center of the galaxy, as is normally represented.


So, if it took God (as supposed some where), 6 days to create our planet, and one day to rest, i strangely feel (s)he is still working somewhere.

At end of this, i wonder if this is the right time to bring up my problem with including and positioning  large images in my blog.


I tried to locate the original pictures, in an effort to find out the authenticity too. Unfortunately no luck there, and apparently several people also tried the same without luck. So bless the person or persons who created this. I assembled these from two or more sites. It took me over a week or so do this, i have almost lost the sites where i picked up which pictures. But if you do a simple search for 'earth size perspective' you will hit a dozen, refine your searches and see more refined(?) versions.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Ethylene

I came across this by accident. But it was interesting reading. I always wondered about this, have recently been affected by this.
"Bananas use ethylene to stimulate fruit ripening. A bunch of bananas will stay green for a long time until the ethylene concentration in the air around them becomes high enough. When that happens, then they begin ripening and they begin releasing more ethylene, which makes them ripen faster and release more ethylene, etc. In this way, all of the bananas will ripen very suddenly and simultaneously." - Ask a Scientist 
 It has both positive and negative effects. The negative is obvious that one bad (ripe or overripe) fruit can quickly damage the rest. The positive is that you can quickly ripen a bunch, or hasten the process, by storing them together in an enclosed environment. No wonder then, that my granny used to store mangoes inside bins storing rice to ripen faster.