General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

Jul 05, 2021

Two Astronauts at China's New Space Station Make First Spacewalk

Two Chinese astronauts made the first spacewalk outside China's new orbital station to work on setting up a 15-meter (50-foot) long robotic arm.
Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo were out of the airlock as Earth rolled past below them. The third crew member, commander Nie Haisheng, stayed inside.
The astronauts arrived on June 17 for a three-month mission aboard China's third orbital station, part of an ambitious space program that landed a robot rover on Mars in May. Their mission comes as the ruling Communist Party celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Frankenstein Star could be on the Brink of a Startling Transformation

The discovery of a moon-size zombie star transforming into another type of stellar corpse could upend astronomers' understanding of how stars evolve.
The cosmic zombie, an embering core of a dead star, or a white dwarf, is about the size of Earth's moon, making it the smallest white dwarf ever found. Despite being tiny, with a radius of 2,670 miles (4,300 kilometers) compared to our sun's 432,470-mile (696,000 km) radius, the stellar corpse has a ginormous mass of about 1.35 times that of the sun.
Dubbed ZTF J190132.9+145808.7, the white dwarf is located about 130 light-years from Earth; and it is rotating super fast, completing a full revolution every 6.9 minutes. Perhaps even weirder, the star's magnetic field is up to 1 billion times stronger than that of Earth's at its surface, or 900 times the strength of the sun's magnetic field.

Jul 04, 2021

Asteroid Named after a Senegalese Expert

The International Astronomical Union has honoured a Senegalese astronomer Maram Kairé by naming an asteroid in the solar system after him.
Mr. Kairé welcomed the news with humility.
Mr. Kairé, whose passion for astronomy began at a tender age, has received congratulatory messages from different countries.
His colleague Mary Teuw Niane said: "From now on the name of Maram Kaïré floats in the Sky, standard bearer of Senegal and Africa."

Jul 03, 2021

Sirisha Bandla, the Second Indian-origin Woman to Fly to Space

Sirisha Bandla will soon become the second India-born woman to fly to space. The first Indian-origin woman to achieve the feat was Kalpana Chawla. After she embarks on her journey on July 11, Bandla would be the fourth Indian to fly into space.
Bandla is vice-president, government affairs and research operations wing of Virgin Galactic as well as its sister concern, Virgin Orbit.
During the space flight, which is the 22nd for VSS Unity, Sirisha's role will be to evaluate research experience.

Jul 02, 2021

SpaceX Launches 88 Satellites as Part of 'Ride-share' Mission

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's space company Spacex has launched 88 satellites, as part of the firm's second in-house "ride-share" mission from Florida, bringing the total number of orbital objects this year to nearly 900.
The company launched the satellites on a reused Falcon 9 rocket for the "Transporter-2" mission, including the first five for a new Pentagon agency and dozens more for various companies, countries and schools.

Jul 01, 2021

Scientists Catch 1st Glimpse of a Black Hole Swallowing a Neutron Star

After more than four years of exploring a menagerie of cosmic happenings through gravitational waves, scientists have finally spotted the third expected variety of collision, twice.
The new flavor of collision includes one black hole and one neutron star, making it a mash-up of sorts. Scientists have observed dozens of mergers of pairs of black holes, and a couple mergers of pairs of neutron stars, the superdense stellar corpses. But a crash between a black hole and neutron star, while predicted by scientists, had not been definitively detected.
Now, researchers say they have done just that, observing the unique ripples in space-time caused by such a collision.
"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," Astrid Lamberts said in a statement. "We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way."

Inflated Hot Jupiter Found Orbiting TOI-1789

Astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered a transiting hot-Jupiter exoplanet around a slightly evolved star called TOI-1789.
Hot Jupiters have set several firsts, from being the first kind of exoplanets discovered with the radial velocity method (51 Peg), to being also the first kind of transiting systems studied for precise radii and orbits (HD 209458b)," said Akanksha Khandelwal, an astronomer at the Indian Institute of Techonology and the Physical Research Laboratory, and colleagues.
"These systems have intrigued the theorists triggering a critical revision of planet formation theories."
TOI-1789 is a slightly evolved, metal-rich, and late F-type star located 729 light-years away in the constellation of Leo.

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