Message From Pluto 4

Scientists just spotted an adorable star that barely even qualifies as one

Sometimes, scientists’ categories for things can be a little demeaning. For example: the “failed star” designation for objects that are larger than planets but smaller than stars.

About 600 light-years away, EBLM J0555-57Ab just barely missed the failed star category. But as will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, it’s just a hair over the boundary, making it one of the smallest stars we know of.

“Failed star” is actually a factual statement — it just means something isn’t large enough to manage to bang hydrogen atoms together to form helium, the basic process at the heart of a burning star.

EBLM J0555-57Ab looks a bit like it shouldn’t have made the cut: It’s only a tiny bit larger than Saturn, or about one-twelfth the size of our sun. Read more (7/12/17)

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pluto hearts u

sending some pluto luv 2 u 2day

Jupiter has 12 newly discovered moons!! I really relate to Valetudo, for some reason…

Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

I’m a little late but I felt contributing to the eclipse lesbians was important

Chocolate bar in Microwave (Part-II)

This diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum finds it place in all physics textbooks:

                                             Source

But the problem was I never got a physical sense of what that meant. It remained ‘yet another physics diagram’ for a really long time.

You see, unlike sound which can be neatly visualized using Schlieren imagery

                                       Source: NPR

or by other unconventional innovative means,

I had no idea how to even get started with electromagnetic waves.

Visualizing the microwave wavelength using a chocolate and an oven (although not my original idea) arose out of this need to understand microwaves a little better.  (Check out part-I of this post)*

But you can do more with some better but less delicious equipment.

You can get a couple of neon bulbs from an electronics shop and place them in a grid inside the microwave to view the standing wave while the microwave is in action

                                                    Source

This tells you how the heat is distributed at the bottom of the microwave oven. The lit bulbs are anti-nodes and unlit ones are the nodes .

You can also try (NOT recommended) to do this by placing a light bulb inside a cup of water instead of a neon bulbs.

                                  Better quality gif  - here              

As you can clearly see the bulb only lights up in the anti-node regions of the standing wave while the remaining regions are the nodes.

You can take this a step further if you have an infrared camera .

Mark Rober had this brilliant idea of using the infrared camera inside a microwave in order to ensure that food that is being microwaved is cooked evenly and completely on the inside.                          

                                              Source

And ElectroBOOM then took this to the next level by placing a cardboard box inside a microwave oven and looking at the heat map using a infrared camera.

                                    Source: ElectroBOOM                                            

That last gif my dear friends was the most satisfying physics animation that I had ever seen for a really long time ! It clearly illustrates the 3D standing wave heat map that is produced inside a microwave oven.

Although these aren’t the only ways to visualize the standing microwave pattern inside a microwave oven, but these are the ones that I was able to test them out with equipment that you can probably find at home or at school/university.

You are welcome to suggest more thought experiments, alternate methods or edits to this post, I would highly appreciate it!

Have a good one!

* Previous post: Chocolate bar in Microwave (Part-I)

** Why is wavelength of light important than its frequency ?                                                                            

someone has waited their entire career to use this headline

teacher: how are you doing? me: *thinking about how sharks have survived 5 major extinctions that wiped out majority of life on earth* me: yeah