Prelims Related News

Prelims Related News

By Jupiter! NASA’s new revelation:

Context

NASA’s Earth-bound Gemini North telescope has beamed back a stunning image of Jupiter showing haze particles over a range of altitudes.

What has happened?

• As the Juno spacecraft orbits Jupiter, the Gemini telescope is providing high-resolution images to help guide its exploration of the giant planet.
• In addition to images captured using adaptive optics, longer wavelength filter on the telescope are used to look at cloud opacity on the planet.
• The observations trace vertical flows that cannot be measured any other way, illuminating the weather, climate and general circulation in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
• Juno spacecraft was 5.5 million miles (8.9 million kilometers) from its July 4th appointment with Jupiter. Over the past two weeks, several milestones occurred that were key to a successful 35-minute burn of its rocket motor, which will place the robotic explorer into a polar orbit around the gas giant.

Conclusion

The combination of Earth-based and spacecraft observations is a powerful one-two punch in exploring Jupiter.

Sharpest laser can help test Einstein’s theory:

Context

Scientists have developed the world’s sharpest laser with record-breaking precision that can help make optical atomic clocks more precise as well as test Einstein’s theory of relativity.

About laser lights

• Theoretically, laser light has only one colour, frequency or wavelength.
• In reality, however, there is always a certain linewidth.
• This precision is useful for various applications such as optical atomic clocks, precision spectroscopy, radio astronomy and for testing the theory of relativity.
• More than 50 years have passed since the first technical realization of the laser, and we cannot imagine how we could live without them today.

Applications of Laser light

• Laser light is used in numerous applications in industry, medicine and information technologies.
• Lasers have brought about a real revolution in fields of research and in metrology — or have even made some new fields possible in the first place.
• One of laser’s outstanding properties is the excellent coherence of the emitted light.
• Ideally, laser light has only one fixed wavelength or frequency. In practice, the spectrum of most types of lasers can, however, reach from a few kHz to a few MHz in width, which is not good enough for numerous experiments requiring high precision.