🔆Astronomical transients

✅Recently, the Indian-American astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni was awarded the Shaw Prize for Astronomy in 2024 for his work on the physics of astronomical transients.

📍Astronomical transients:

✅In astronomy, a ‘transient’ is any celestial object whose brightness changes in short spans of time.

✅There are many kinds of astronomical transients, all of them united by phenomena that are violent in some measure.

✅Astronomers study transients to understand where their violence comes from and what that can tell us about non-transient events.

✅Examples of transients
Supernovae: When the outer layers of large stars blow up while their cores implode because the stars have run out of elements to fuse. Many a supernova has been known to become so bright that it emits light more intensely than the stars in the rest of its host galaxy combined.

✅Active Galactic nucleus (AGN): The centres of massive galaxies host supermassive black holes. Sometimes, these black holes actively feast on matter in their orbit. Interactions between the black holes and the matter in this process cause the latter to acquire energy and glow with changing brightness.

✅Fast Radio Burst (FRB): It was discovered in 2007 and it can emit more than 10 times as much energy as the Sun in a few milliseconds.

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🔆Gliese 12b:

✅It is a newly discovered temperate, Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting a cool red dwarf called Gliese 12, located in the constellation Pisces.

✅Red dwarfs have lower luminosity, which means their habitable zones are much closer to the star.

✅Gliese 12 is about 27% the size of our sun and 60% of its temperature.

✅Gliese 12 b is located 40 light-years away, which is relatively close in astronomical terms. 

✅Since its star is so much smaller than the sun, Gliese 12b still falls within the habitable zone—the ideal distance away from a star where liquid water can exist—even though it completes its orbit every 12.8 days.

✅Gliese 12 b is roughly the size of Earth or slightly smaller, making it comparable to Venus.

✅This similarity in size makes Gliese 12 b an excellent subject for studying rocky planets.
Its mass is approximately 3.87 times that of Earth.

✅It receives 1.6 times more energy from its star than Earth does from the Sun, and about 85% of what Venus experiences.

✅The estimated surface temperature of Gliese 12 b is 107°F (42°C), assuming it has no atmosphere.

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🔆What r evacuation slides in Aircraft, why are they needed?

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🔆Hibonite ( cobalt - blue ) in News

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🔆What types of turbulence do aircraft face?

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🔆Parkinson's disease

✅Parkinson's disease is a progressive disorder that affects the nervous system and the parts of the body controlled by the nerves.

✅It is also called atypical parkinsonism, refers to a group of neurodegenerative movement disorders that resemble idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) with certain distinguishing clinical and pathophysiological features.
They attack the brain cells and nerves and lead to movement disorders, just like Parkinson’s.

✅The cause of Parkinson’s Plus Syndrome is unknown, with a combination of genetic and environmental factors usually held responsible.

📍Symptoms
✅Tremors in one hand
✅Balance and coordination problems
✅Difficulty walking or shuffling gait
✅Stiffness in the jaw or reduced facial expressions

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🔆What is the Zero Debris Charter?

✅Twelve nations have signed the Zero Debris Charter at the ESA/EU Space Council recently, solidifying their commitment to the long-term sustainability of human activities in Earth orbit.

📍 Zero Debris Charter:

✅It is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled at the ESA Space Summit in Seville meeting in November 2023.
✅The Charter comes after ESA Member States encouraged the agency to implement “a Zero Debris approach for its missions and to encourage partners and other actors to pursue similar paths”.
✅It is the first initiative of its kind to bring together the largest array and variety of space actors around the world with the joint goal of creating no more debris by 2030 and making possible the long-term sustainability of space activities.
✅It aims to combine far-reaching guiding principles and highly ambitious yet realistic technical targets on which to build an ambitious Zero Debris roadmap, driving global space debris mitigation and remediation efforts.
✅The charter is a non-legally binding agreement, but it fosters a community of proactive actors working collectively towards jointly defined targets for 2030. 
✅The charter sets out a number of targets, including that a mission’s probability of generating space debris should remain below 1 in 1,000 per object.
✅It also sets a target of 99% success for post-mission disposal, including through external means when necessary. It encourages transparent information sharing and space traffic coordination.
✅To implement the Charter, the ESA will focus on developing ground-breaking technologies for satellite end-of-life disposal, in-orbit servicing and active debris removal.
✅In addition, ESA will work hand-in-hand with institutions in charge of regulatory aspects.

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🔆Tiny satellite to measure heat lost from Earth’s poles

Why in news?

✅Recently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched one of the two climate satellites, which would study heat emissions at Earth’s poles. The second satellite will be launched in the following days.
✅The mission to study the poles has been named PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment).

📍Significance of measuring heat emissions at Earth’s poles
To analyse Earth’s energy budget
✅The Earth’s energy budget is the balance between the amount of heat incoming to Earth from the Sun and the amount of heat outgoing from Earth into space.
✅The difference between the two determines the planet’s temperature and climate.
✅Currently no way to measure heat radiated from the Arctic and Antarctica
✅A large amount of the heat radiated from the Arctic and Antarctica is emitted as far-infrared radiation.
✅Far-infrared radiations are wavelengths of 3-1,000 μm within the infrared range of electromagnetic radiation.
✅However, there is currently no way to measure this type of energy. As a result, there is a gap in knowledge about the planet’s energy budget.

📍CubeSats
✅CubeSats are miniature satellites with a basic design consisting of a 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm cube, known as "one unit" or "1U."
✅Each unit weighs no more than 1.33 kg.
✅As per NASA, depending on their mission, CubeSats can be configured in various sizes, including 1.5, 2, 3, 6, and 12U.

📍Origins and Development
✅CubeSats were first developed in 1999 by California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University as educational tools.
✅Their low cost and reduced mass compared to traditional satellites made them attractive for technology demonstrations, scientific research, and commercial purposes.

📍PREFIRE Mission CubeSats
✅Each PREFIRE satellite is a 6U CubeSat, measuring approximately 90 cm in height and nearly 120 cm in width when the solar panels are deployed.
✅These panels provide the necessary power for the satellite's operations.

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🔆What are Virus-like particles (VLPs)?

✅Scientists at the Institute of Advanced Virology (IAV), Thiruvananthapuram, recently developed a novel way of generating non-infectious Nipah virus-like particles (VLPs) in the laboratory.

📍Virus-like Particles (VLPs):

✅VLPs are molecules that resemble viruses but lack infectivity because of the absence of viral genetic material.
✅They are a very effective way of creating vaccines against diseases such as human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis B, malaria, and more.
✅As they are very similar to real viral molecules, introducing a VLP into the body will trigger an immune response, but a person will not experience any symptoms of the virus they are being vaccinated against. 
✅Once the body has had an immune response to the VLP, it will recognize the virus and prevent infection in the future, giving people immunity to that particular virus.

📍Structure:
✅VLPs are very small, with a particle radius of approximately 20 to 200 nm. This means that they can easily enter the lymph nodes, where the immune system is activated in the case of an infection.
✅A VLP consists of one or more structural proteins that can be arranged in multiple layers.
✅They can also contain an outer lipid envelope, which is the outermost layer that covers a large number of different viruses.  This outer layer protects the genetic material inside the virus particle.
Creating a VLP vaccine can use bacterial, yeast, insect or mammalian cells. 
✅When used as a vaccine, VLPs cause a robust immunogenic response due to their high-density display of epitopes and the capacity to present multiple proteins to the immune system.
✅Most recently, VLPs have been employed as nanomachines to deliver pharmaceutically active products to specific sites and into specific cells in the body.

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🔆Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai (HTHH):

✅It is a submarine stratovolcano in the Tongan archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean.
✅The HTHH volcano includes the small islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai, along with shallow reefs along the caldera rim of a much larger submarine edifice in the western South Pacific Ocean, west of the main inhabited islands in the Kingdom of Tonga.
✅It is located about 30 km south of the submarine volcano of Fonuafoʻou and 65 km north of Tongatapu, the country's main island.
✅The volcano is part of the highly active Tonga–Kermadec Islands volcanic arc, a subduction zone extending from New Zealand north-northeast to Fiji.
✅The Tonga-Kermadec arc was formed as a result of the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Indo-Australian Plate.
✅It has erupted regularly over the past few decades.

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🔆New Galaxy:

✅The galaxy called JADES-GS-z14-0, is revealed as it was just 290m years after the big bang, at the dawn of the universe. The telescope’s previous record holder was a galaxy seen at 325m years after the big bang, which happened nearly 14bn years ago.
✅The newly observed galaxy is much brighter than expected, suggesting that the first generation of stars were either more luminous or formed much more rapidly than conventional cosmological theories have predicted.
✅The impressive size and brightness of JADES-GS-z14-0 is likely being fueled by young and actively forming stars, rather than a supermassive black hole.
✅In JADES-GS-z14-0, Webb can see a significant amount of oxygen, which tells researchers the galaxy is already quite mature.


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