Tag: Science

Planet shows a star’s death doesn’t have to doom its worlds Using the Webb telescope, scientists have discovered an atmosphere around WD 1856 b, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a white dwarf — the first time an atmosphere has been found on a world orbiting a dead star. The atmosphere has hydrocarbons and clouds of aerosols....

The Moon is not the only natural object travelling through space alongside Earth. Several small asteroids travel around the Sun in near lockstep with our planet. And just like Earth, these space rocks also take a year to complete a full orbit. Today, we know of eight such “quasi-moons” or quasi-satellites. One of them may,...

The heatwave sapping Europe this June does not spare CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), whose dull grey buildings give little hint of the underground that sets the lab apart from any other hive of colossal engineering on earth. Here, in tunnels beneath the Franco-Swiss border, physicists drive protons — among the particles at the...

There is nothing to write home about the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) performance in the first half of 2026, with just one launch in January, the PSLV-C62 mission/EOS-N1 mission that ended in a failure. However, on the positive side, the anomaly in the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) seems to have been resolved with...

Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder & CEO of Skyroot Aerospace, spoke to The Hindu after the Hyderabad-based private space launch company announced the launch window for Vikram-1’s first test flight named Mission Aagaman from July 12 to August 4, 2026. The Vikram-1 launch vehicle is India’s first privately developed orbital-class rocket designed to carry small satellites...

Twelve Indian researchers across three countries have discovered a rare, nonconformist radio galaxy, shaped like a bow and arrow and 1.8 million light years wide, located approximately 2 billion light years from Earth. A light year is about 5.88 trillion miles. A radio galaxy, powered by supermassive black holes at its core, is a type of...

In cricket, few strategies are as deeply ingrained as the left-right batting combination: where of the two batters at the crease, one is left-handed and other right-handed. Coaches, commentators, and even players have argued that every time the batters switch ends when they run, the bowler and captain have to adjust their tactics and field...

India’s first privately developed orbital-class rocket is all set for its maiden launch. On July 2, private space launch company Skyroot Aerospace, based in Hyderabad, announced that the launch window for Vikram-1’s first test flight, named Mission Aagaman, is between July 12 and August 4. It said that Test Flight-1 is targeted for no earlier...

Language is a key aspect of human life that most likely came up more than a lakh years ago — but linguists still disagree on how exactly it evolved. The influential U.S. linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed that complex modern language emerged suddenly, a theory that many linguists still stick to. But some believe...