The Bohred Biologist

Coriolis force is a force experienced by objects moving on the surface of the earth in a direction that is not along the direction of Earth's rotation. Since the earth rotates from west to east, any object that is not moving in this direction, will experience the Coriolis force. This force has been observed to affect large cyclonic storms and causes them to rotate clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. Tropical storm Leslie off the coast of North America captured by NASA on August 30th 2012. Courtesy: Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center Though this is a real, observable scientific effect, there is a widespread myth associated with it. In this post I am going to tackle this myth head on.

As it has been quite sometime since I posted an article, I thought the best way to restart would be to write the next part of the most popular series of articles in my blog "The Universe through my telescope" (yup! that's what the stats say). And what better photo to post than that of the majestic planet, Saturn.

A friend recently recently asked me this intriguing question - what keeps the earth spinning in space? Though it sounds like a simple question, the answer depends on our understanding of a complex process like the formation of the solar system. But the simple answer to this question is angular momentum and inertia. Let's see how the earth's rotation depends on these two terms from classical physics.

Good news for Einstein's fans and bad news for people who always want to prove Einstein wrong - CERN's press release earlier today confirmed that neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed of light. Though physicists always say that a new, unexpected result is always exciting, they will be relieved that such a fundamental constant like the speed of light is not broken. Else they might have had to "relearn" all of modern physics.

The transit of Venus observed by millions of people yesterday was a spectacular sight. Be it amateur astronomers or the general public, everyone was excited to watch the dark disk of Venus move across the surface of the sun. Though quite a lot of people observed the rare phenomenon, not many people were aware of the transit. It is unfortunate that people did not market this event like the other infamous event that is "scheduled" to happen later this year (read as December 21 2012 ). In this post I am going to give a few reason why you should have watched the transit of Venus yesterday.

Want to see the most beautiful photo of the Andromeda galaxy? Here it is... This is a composite image made of 11 different images that have been stitched together. The reason behind this is that Andromeda is MASSIVE!!! It is more than 250,000 light years across. That's about 2.5 times the size of our own galaxy - The Milky Way. Before I talk more about Andromeda or about this image, here is the photo...

The title of the post is definitely confusing. Why would anyone want to look at the moon and miss the beautiful and rare sight of Venus moving across the sun ( Transit of Venus )?  This is equivalent to a car racing fan admiring the beauty of a normal road car when a Formula 1 car is parked right next to it. No astronomer would want to do that, especially using a billion dollar telescope like Hubble . Then why is NASA planning to do this?