SCIENCE

The mission called Dragonfly is due to launch in 2027, and will reach Titan in 2034. Dragonfly carries an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), which will shed light on the kinds of chemical steps that occurred on Earth that ultimately led to the formation of life, called prebiotic chemistry.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, astronomers detected gaseous water in the planet-forming disc around the star named 'V883 Orionis' about 1300 light-years away from Earth. This water carries a chemical signature that explains the journey of water from star-forming gas clouds to planets, and supports the idea that water on Earth is even older than our Sun.

A team of astrobiologists developed an AI model and tested its ability to look out for sparse life hidden away in salt domes, rocks and crystals at Salar de Pajonales at the boundary of the Chilean Atacama Desert and Altiplano -- one of the driest places on the planet, resembling the features of a Martian surface.

The rays were imaged as the Sun descended over the horizon on February 2, with "rays of light illuminated a bank of clouds". These are also known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for "twilight". "It was the first time sun rays have been so clearly viewed on Mars," according to the mission officials. Curiosity captured the scene during the rover's latest twilight cloud survey.

A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disk) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface. Prominences are anchored to the Sun's surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun's hot outer atmosphere, called the corona. Reports last week surfaced that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) caught "a piece of Sun being broken off" from its surface.

The rotation of the Earth's solid inner core may have recently paused and could be reversing, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience. The authors showed evidence that oscillation in the rotation of the inner core coincides with periodic changes in the Earth's surface system and that there is an interaction between different layers of the Earth.

The Arp-Madore catalog is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. "Arp-Madore 417-391", which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies were distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving their cores nestled side by side, said NASA.

The Milky Way Galaxy where we live includes stars of various ages, including stars still forming. But in some other galaxies, known as elliptical galaxies, all of the stars are old and about the same age. This indicates that early in their histories elliptical galaxies had a period of prolific star formation that suddenly ended.

Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact, and very massive at the centre of the Milky Way. But the image of Sagittarius A (Sgr A) which is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, provides the first direct visual evidence of it.

The election to the 170-year-old Academy is recognition of his significant contributions to science by its members. Bawa, who is also an elected fellow of the Royal Society (London) and the American Philosophical Society, was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences late last night India time.