Friday, May 29, 2015

APhO 2015 Question Paper







Asian Physics Olympiad (APhO) is a premier physics competition for pre-university students from Asian countries. 16th Asian Physics Olympiad, 2015 was held at Hangzhou, China from 3rd to 11th May. Here I've uploaded the questionnaire of 16th APhO. 

Solutions can be found here

Thursday, May 28, 2015

London International Youth Science Forum (LIYSF) 2015

















LIYSF is a two week residential event held at Imperial College London, with lectures and demonstrations from leading scientists, visits to industrial sites, research centres, scientific institutions and organisations, including world class laboratories and universities.

LIYSF attracts over 400 of the world's leading young scientists aged 17-21 years old from more than 60 participating countries. There is an active social calendar with events designed to enable those from around the world to learn about different cultures. The scope of LIYSF extends further than broadening scientific understanding to engage students in education on other cultures and develop lasting, international friendships. 

Hurry Up! Application period for 2015 is going to be over soon.  Apply Here!

Introduction to Astronomy Notes














Introduction to Astronomy is an amazing astronomy course by Professor Ronen Plesser of Duke University. The course is offered through Coursera, an online learning platform. This is an ideal course for the students who are preparing for astronomy Olympiad. 

Here are the notes from Olivier Henry (henry@alumni.caltech.edu), based on Introduction to Astronomy course. These notes cover most of the topics needed to learn for astronomy olympiad. I hope it'll help most of you.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

How to Estimate Star Magnitude?

Even to casual stargazers it’s pretty obvious that the stars are of differing brightness. Astronomers always like to catalog and classify objects in the sky, and the brightness of stars is no exception. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus devised the system we use for this purpose, called the magnitude scale. 

In Hipparchus’s magnitude scale, the brightest stars were known as first magnitude and the faintest stars were sixth magnitude. He gave a higher number to the faintest stars, which sounds a little topsy-turvy until you swap the word ‘magnitude’ for the word ‘class’. 

Looking at it this way you start to see them as ‘first class’ stars, ‘second class’ stars and so on as the stars get fainter, putting the scale into perspective. At the brighter end of the scale, magnitudes become a little awkward as some stars and other objects are brighter than first magnitude. There are stars with zero magnitude – wrongly suggesting they have no brightness – and in cases where the stars are even brighter, they have a negative magnitude, as you can see in these examples:


The Sun
–27
Full Moon
–12
Venus (at its brightest)
–4.4
Arcturus
–0.04
Vega
+0.03
Polaris
+1.99
Pluto
+13.9
 
With telescopes and imaging equipment like CCD cameras, you can go way beyond the sixth-magnitude objects on Hipparchus’s original scale and capture objects like Pluto, which is far too dim to be seen with the naked eye. The Hubble Space Telescope has managed to image objects as faint as magnitude +30. Don’t forget that the magnitude doesn’t tell you how luminous an object really is in itself; it’s a measure of the apparent brightness of a star as seen from our vantage point here on Earth.
 

Friday, May 15, 2015

Apparent Brightness and Magnitude

A basic observable quantity for a star is its brightness. Because stars can have a very broad range of brightness, astronomers commonly introduce a logarithmic scale called a magnitude scale to classify the brightness.

The Magnitude Scale

The magnitudes m1 and m2 for two stars are related to the corresponding brightnesses b1 and b2 through the equation

where "log" means the (base-10) logarithm of the corresponding number; that is, the power to which 10 must be raised to give the number. Because this relation is logarithmic, a very large range in brightnesses corresponds to a much smaller range of magnitudes; this is a major utility of the magnitude scale. 

Friday, May 1, 2015

16th Asian Physics Olympiad, 2015










16th Asian Physics Olympiad will take place at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China from 3rd to 11th May, 2015. Bangladesh Physics Olympiad committee has selected a 8-members team who will represent team Bangladesh. Selected participants are as follows:

1. Supanto Rakshit
2. Shah-Habibur Rahman