2024

A significant advancement in ground-based astronomy comes from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), with the development of a critical tool for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This next-generation telescope, poised to be one of the world’s most powerful, will benefit greatly from the Indian contribution. Overcoming Atmospheric Hurdles for Crystal-Clear Observations The sheer size…

Uranus, the solar system’s enigmatic ice giant, has long puzzled scientists with its unusually weak radiation belts. Detected by Voyager 2 in 1986, these belts – regions of charged particles trapped by a planet’s magnetic field – were a hundred times weaker than expected. New research sheds light on this anomaly, suggesting a connection to…

A team of astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have unearthed compelling evidence for a long-sought astronomical anomaly: an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). The candidate black hole is located within Omega Centauri, the most massive and luminous globular cluster in the Milky Way galaxy. Globular clusters are densely packed collections of millions of…

The tireless quest to unravel the mysteries of our solar system has yielded another exciting discovery. In recent observations of a near-Earth object (NEO) designated 2011 UL21, astronomers at NASA ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have stumbled upon a previously unknown celestial companion. Utilizing the immense power of the Deep Space Network’s (DSN) radar system,…