SCIENCE

The understanding of physical properties of exoplanets with extreme accuracy can help to explore the ones that could be similar to planet Earth and hence might be habitable. With this purpose, a group of astronomers at Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, has been using the ground-based optical telescopes available in India and the data obtained by the space telescope "Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite" or TESS.

Scientists at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have examined collisions between the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft and dust.

The newly found black hole was spotted lurking in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud -- a neighbour galaxy of the Milky Way. The detection in NGC 1850 marks the first time a black hole has been found in a young cluster of stars.

The trial to determine the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine called ChAdOx1 biEBOV, will be conducted on 26 volunteers, aged between 18 and 55 years. "We are carrying out a clinical trial of a new Ebola vaccine called 'ChAdOx1 biEBOV' which is designed to target two of the deadliest species of Ebola-causing viruses," said Jenner Institute, University of Oxford in a statement.

NASA selected INCUS through the agency's Earth Venture Mission-3 (EVM-3) solicitation that sought complete, space-based investigations to address important science questions and produce data of societal relevance within the Earth science field. NASA received 12 proposals for EVM-3 missions in March 2021.

Scientists detected water along with carbon monoxide in SPT0311-58 -- made up of two galaxies -- located nearly 12.88 billion light years from Earth. Water, in particular, is the third most abundant molecule in the universe after molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide.SPT0311-58 was first seen by ALMA scientists in 2017 at its location, or time, at a time when the universe was just 780 million years old.

National Geographic was selected following a competitive selection process. The US space agency and National Geographic has entered into a non-reimbursable (no-exchange-of-funds) Space Act Agreement to collaborate on compact, lightweight audiovisual hardware to fly inside Orion and related support for the project, NASA said in a statement.

With the launch of this unique ocean mission, India joins the elite club of nations such as the US, Russia, Japan, France, and China to have such underwater vehicles for carrying out subsea activities, a release from the Earth Sciences Ministry said.

"POW! The sun just served up a powerful flare," the US space agency said in a tweet. The X1-class flare caused a temporary, yet strong radio blackout across the sunlit side of Earth centred on South America, according to the US Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which tracks space weather events.

While the bioproduction process would use three resources native to the Red Planet -- carbon dioxide, sunlight, and frozen water -- two microbes will be transported from Earth to Mars. The first is cyanobacteria (algae), which would take CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and use sunlight to create sugars, and second an engineered E. coli which will convert those sugars into a Mars-specific propellant for rockets and other propulsion devices, said a team led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.