Week Review

The real cool thing about learning something new is when you listen to a presentation by a scientist and you actually understand what he is talking about. I am a real big fan of TED. "TED", according to their about page, "is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading". Rather than watching an uninteresting show on TV that is really designed to force you to watch advertisements, spend 20 minutes watching any of the TED presentations on any topic you are interested in, you'll be glad you did.
Last night I was watching a presentation by Garik Israelian, on spectroscopy. The title was: How Spectroscopy could reveal Alien Life. And yea, all the stuff he was talking about, I understood. In fact, I looked at those spectral lines produced by the different gases in our lab. I understood how those lines were created and why. I understood how one can look at those lines and deduce that this star is made of those elements. And that is real neat!
Now here are a few things I did not know. The sun has 24,000 absorption lines.

So the picture on the left is the spectrum of the sunlight with all those dark lines, the absorption lines, which indicate what elements are on the sun. I knew that. But what I did not know was that we have no idea what 15% or 3,500 of those lines are. It's the year 2010, the biggest particle collider ever built, CERN, just smashed a bunch of particles, but we still don't exactly know what some of the elements are that appear to be on the sun.
Israelian also talked about a spectrograph from a star they were looking at and the conclusion was, the atmosphere of this star was polluted by a Supernova, which has collapsed and became a black hole, and this star is now orbiting in a binary system around the black hole. All that by essentially looking at light emitted from a star!
But that's not all, according to Israelian, spectroscopy can be used to detect sound waves on stars. But wait there is more, we can detect if there is tectonic and volcanic activity on a distant planet, in fact, spectroscopy can be used to see if there is vegetation on a planet. All this by looking at a spectrum and some dark lines that occur at certain wavelength, amazing!