General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2016

Jan 2016

Feb 19, 2022

Astronomers Find Widest-Separation Brown Dwarf Pair to Date

At an estimated distance of 130.5 light-years, CWISE J014611.20-050850.0AB has a projected separation of 129 AU (astronomical units), or 129 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth, making it the widest-separation brown dwarf pair found to date.
Brown dwarfs are cool, dim objects that have a size between that of a gas-giant planet and that of a Sun-like star.
Sometimes called failed stars, these objects are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, yet they have star-like attributes.
While stars are often found in binary systems, brown dwarf binaries are much rarer.

Feb 18, 2022

Largest Galaxy Ever Discovered Baffles Scientists

Astronomers just found the largest galaxy ever discovered, and they have no idea how it got so big.
At 16.3 million light-years wide, the Alcyoneus Galaxy has a diameter 160 times wider than the Milky Way and four times that of the previous title holder, IC 1101, which spans 3.9 million light-years, researchers reported in a new study. Named after one of the mythical giants who fought Hercules and whose name means "mighty ass" in Greek, Alcyoneus is roughly 3 billion light-years from Earth.
The galactic monster is an especially large example of a radio galaxy, or a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the center which gobbles up enormous amounts of matter before spitting it out — sending gigantic two jets of plasma moving at close to the speed of light. After traveling millions of light-years, the plasma beams slow, spreading out into plumes that emit light in the form of radio waves. In the case of Alcyoneus, its lobes are the largest ever discovered.

Feb 17, 2022

First-Ever Quadruple Asteroid

Astronomers discovered a third moon orbiting the main-belt asteroid (130) Elektra. This is the first quadruple asteroid ever found.
Elektra is a large main-belt asteroid. It was first discovered by Litchfield Observatory astronomer Christian Peters on February 17, 1873.
Elektra has an effective diameter of 199 km.
The first moon of Elektra was discovered in 2003 by Dr. William Merline and his team. It was discovered using "Keck II telescope" at the Mauna Kea Observatory.
First moon of Elektra is designated as S/2003 (130) 1 or S1.
It has a diameter of 6 km. It orbits 1,300 km away from the parent asteroid, with a period of 5.3 days.
The second moon of Elektra is designated as S/2014 (130) 1 or S2.
It was discovered on December 6, 2014 by Dr. Bin Yang and his team, using SPHERE facility on ESO's Very Large Telescope.
It has a diameter of around 2 km.
It orbits 500 km away from Elektra, once every 1.2 days.
Astronomers have now discovered the third moon, orbiting Elekta and is designated as S/2014 (130) 2 or S3. It has the diameter of 1.6 km and an orbital period of 0.679 days. It revolves inside S2 orbit, with a semi-major axis of 344 km. It has an orbital period of 0.679 days.

LOFAR Telescope Spots Biggest Radio Galaxy Ever

The newly-discovered radio galaxy, dubbed Alcyoneus, has a projected length of 16.3 million light-years (4.99 Mpc).
The giant radio galaxy definition accommodates our limited ability to infer a radio galaxy's true proper length from observations.
A radio galaxy is called a giant radio galaxy if and only if its proper length projected onto the plane of the sky exceeds some threshold, usually chosen to be 2.3 or 3.3 million light-years.
Currently, there are about a thousand giant radio galaxies known, the majority of which have been found in the northern sky.

NITI Aayog Partners with PhonePe to Host First-ever Open-to-all Hackathon Event

NITI Aayog partnered with PhonePe to host the first-ever open-to-all hackathon event for ideating and coming up with creative solutions for the FinTech space.
The hackathon will provide an opportunity for innovators, digital creators and developers from all over India to think, ideate and code.
Participants at the hackathon need to use any open-data APIs like PhonePe Pulse along with frameworks such as account aggregator as a foundation to power some the use cases.

Feb 16, 2022

IXPE Space Observatory Collects Its First Imaging Data

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), an international collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), captured an image of Cassiopeia A, the youngest known supernova remnant in our Milky Way Galaxy.
IXPE is NASA's first mission dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from the most extreme and mysterious objects in the Universe: supernova remnants, supermassive black holes, and dozens of other high-energy objects.
The observatory launched December 9, 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It now orbits 600 km (370 miles) above Earth's equator.
IXPE builds on and complements the scientific discoveries of other telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Feb 15, 2022

In a first, Taiwan Researchers Become Part of Satellite Launch Mission by ISRO

In a first, India's space research organization or ISRO launched a satellite jointly developed by a team of international researchers including from Taiwan. INSPIRESat-1 satellite wasa developed by scientists from universities of the US, Taiwan, India, and Singapore.
The universities are--University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Taiwan's National Central University (NCU), and Singapore' Nanyang Technological University. INSPIRESat-1 stands for International Research and Teaching Satellite Project satellite one.
The satellite will provide information on Sun's corona and its impact on Earth's ionosphere.

India's Tech Spending to Grow 8.7% in 2022, Highest in Asia-Pacific

According to a new report, the tech spending in India is likely to grow 8.7 per cent in 2022, one of the highest growth rates in the Asia Pacific region.
Although the second wave of Covid-19 dampened the pace of India's recovery in early 2021, economic activity picked up in the second half of the year thanks to a sharp drop in case numbers and progress made on vaccination.

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