Knowledge Update

​Washington, Jan 7 (IANS) NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered exocomets -- comets outside our solar system -- plunging onto a young star that resides 95 light-years from Earth.

This star, called HD 172555, represents the third extrasolar system where astronomers have detected doomed, wayward comets. All of the systems are young, under 40 million years old, NASA said in a statement on Saturday.

The exocomets were not directly seen around the star, but their presence was inferred by detecting gas that is likely the vaporised remnants of their icy nuclei.

Astronomers have found similar plunges in our own solar system. Sun-grazing comets routinely fall into our sun. 

"Seeing these sun-grazing comets in our solar system and in three extrasolar systems means that this activity may be common in young star systems," said study leader Carol Grady from NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 

The presence of these doomed comets provides circumstantial evidence for "gravitational stirring" by an unseen Jupiter-size planet, where comets deflected by its gravity are catapulted into the star, the scientists said.

These events also provide new insights into the past and present activity of comets in our solar system. 

"This activity at its peak represents a star's active teenage years. Watching these events gives us insight into what probably went on in the early days of our solar system, when comets were pelting the inner solar system bodies, including Earth," Grady said.

The scientists even believe that infalling comets could have transported water to Earth and the other inner planets of our solar system.

"In fact, these star-grazing comets may make life possible, because they carry water and other life-forming elements, such as carbon, to terrestrial planets," Grady noted.

The findings were presented at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas.

​Lhasa, Jan 7 (IANS) China is working to set up the world's highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes in Tibet Autonomous Region to detect the faintest echoes resonating from the universe, which may reveal more about the Big Bang.

Construction has started for the first telescope, code-named Ngari No.1, 30 km south of Shiquanhe town in Ngari Prefecture, said Yao Yongqiang, chief researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinhua news agency reported. 

The telescope, located 5,250 meters above sea level, will detect and gather precise data on primordial gravitational waves in the Northern Hemisphere. 

It is expected to be operational by 2021.

Yao said the second phase involves a series of telescopes, code-named Ngari No. 2, to be located about 6,000 meters above sea level. He did not give a time frame for construction of Ngari No. 2.

The budget for the two-phase Ngari gravitational wave observatory is an estimated 130 million yuan ($18.8 million). The project was initiated by the Institute of High Energy Physics, National Astronomical Observatories, and Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, among others.

Ngari, with its high altitude, clear sky, and minimal human activity, is said to be one of the world's best spots to detect tiny twists in cosmic light.

Yao said the Ngari observatory will be among the world's top primordial gravitational wave observation bases, alongside the South Pole Telescope and the facility in Chile's Atacama Desert.

Gravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity 100 years ago, but it wasn't until 2016 that scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory announced proof of the waves' existence, spurring fresh research interest among the world's scientists.

China has announced its own gravitational wave research plans, which include the launch of satellites and setting up FAST, a 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope in southwest China's Guizhou Province.

​London, Jan 6 (IANS) It's lonely life for the elderly in Britain. Half a million people in the isles over the age of 60 usually spend each day alone, with no interaction with others, a poll said.

It also said that nearly half a million more commonly do not see or speak to anyone for five or six days a week, the Guardian reported on Friday.

Age UK, which commissioned the research, said the results highlighted a growing number of chronically lonely older people. This was placing increasing demand on Britain's health services.

The charity has been running a pilot programme in eight areas where Age UK groups were actively trying to identify lonely older people and offer them companionship.

Caroline Abrahams, Age UK's charity director, said: "This new analysis shows that about a million older people in our country (Britain) are profoundly alone, many of whom are likely to be enduring the pain and suffering of loneliness."

"That's why the early results of our pilot programme into tackling loneliness in later life are so important: nine in 10 older people who were often lonely when they started the programme were less lonely six to 12 weeks later," she said. 

Many even said that they felt generally happier, more confident and more independent as a result, the poll showed.

"Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for loneliness, but our pilot programme shows we really can make a difference and provide crucial insights into how the problem can be successfully overcome," Abrahams said.

The Age UK groups worked with local people such as hairdressers, shopkeepers and faith groups to help identify older people experiencing or at risk of loneliness.

They developed networks with professionals in voluntary and statutory services, such as community nurses, social workers and police community support officers, and others. 

Age UK has also developed a loneliness heat-mapping tool, which assesses risk factors such as age, marital status and number of household members.

People identified as lonely by Age UK groups were provided with telephone support and short-term, face-to-face companionship.

The results of the poll would feed into Age UK's submissions to the 'commission on loneliness', devised by late Labour MP Jo Cox, before she was murdered in 2016. 

The research agency TNS polled British residents aged over 60, asking them how many days a week they usually spent alone with no visits or telephone calls. 

Out of 2,241 people, 498 said they spent seven days on their own and 464 said five or six days. 

The results were then extrapolated to reach the national figures.

Washington, Jan 7 (IANS) NASA has said two of its astronauts -- Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson -- have completed the first of two power upgrade spacewalks at 1:55 p.m. EST (12:25 a.m. Saturday, India time).

During the six-hour-and-thirty-two-minute spacewalk, the two NASA astronauts successfully installed three new adapter plates and hooked up electrical connections for three of the six new lithium-ion batteries on the International Space Station, NASA scientists wrote in a blog post.

They also accomplished several get-ahead tasks, including a photo survey of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

The new lithium-ion batteries and adapter plates replace the nickel-hydrogen batteries currently used on the station to store electrical energy generated by the station's solar arrays.

Robotic work to update the batteries began in January. 

This was the first of two spacewalks planned to finalise the installation, NASA said.

Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) are scheduled to conduct the second spacewalk on January 13.

Space station crew members have conducted 196 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. 

Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,224 hours and six minutes working outside the station.

​Washington, Jan 6 (IANS) By combining data from several telescopes around the world including India's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in Pune, astronomers have discovered a cosmic double whammy unlike any ever seen before.

Two of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe, a supermassive black hole, and the collision of giant galaxy clusters, have combined to create a stupendous cosmic particle accelerator, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"We have seen each of these spectacular phenomena separately in many places," said lead researcher Reinout van Weeren of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

"This is the first time, however, that we seen them clearly linked together in the same system," Weeren noted.

This cosmic double whammy is found in a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 located about two billion light years from Earth. 

The two clusters are both very massive, each weighing about a quadrillion or a billion times the mass of the Sun.

This discovery solves a long-standing mystery in galaxy cluster research about the origin of beautiful swirls of radio emission stretching for millions of light years, detected in Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 with the GMRT.

The team determined that as the shock waves travel across the cluster for hundreds of millions of years, the doubly accelerated particles produce giant swirls of radio emission.

"This result shows that a remarkable combination of powerful events generate these particle acceleration factories, which are the largest and most powerful in the Universe," co-author William Dawson of Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, California, said. 

Besides GMRT, the researchers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the US National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, and other telescopes to find out what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy clusters.

"It is a bit poetic that it took a combination of the world's biggest observatories to understand this," Dawson noted.

"It's almost like launching a rocket into low-Earth orbit and then getting shot out of the Solar System by a second rocket blast," co-author Felipe Andrade-Santos, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"These particles are among the most energetic particles observed in the Universe, thanks to the double injection of energy," Andrade-Santos explained.

​Tokyo, Jan 6 (IANS) The shares of Toyota Motor fell on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) on Friday after US President-elect Donald Trump threatened the Japanese car manufacturer with customs duties if it continues the construction of its new vehicle assembly plant in Mexico.

​New York, Jan 6 (IANS) Photo sharing for iPhone users can be more fun as Instagram on Friday rolled out iPhone 7 and 7 Plus-specific features that support wide colour capture and display -- and users don't need to update the app.

New York, Jan 6 (IANS) Apple has announced that its app developers earned over $20 billion, up over 40 per cent from 2015, in 2016 alone and also stated that New Year's Day was the highest single day ever for the App Store with nearly $240 million in purchases.

​London, Jan 6 (IANS) Maintaining London's access to skilled European Union (EU) workers after Brexit is "vital" for the British capital's future prosperity, a report revealed on Friday.

​Las Vegas, Jan 6 (IANS) ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) on Friday unveiled its latest lineup of gaming gear at the ongoing Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2017) in Las Vegas. The Taiwan-based computer hardware company also introduced a router designed specifically for gamers, Rapture GT-AC5300, at the event. The 2017 gaming-gear lineup includes -- GX800VH, G701, G752, GL502, GL702, GL553 and GL753 gaming laptops, and GT51CH, GD30, G20CI and GR8 II gaming desktops. Featuring tri-band Wi-Fi, eight-port gigabit-LAN, 1.8GHz quad-core CPU, GT-AC5300 enables fast and responsive network gaming, the company said in a statement. GX800VH is the world's first gaming laptop with an 18-inch panel and NVIDIA G-SYNC technology for real 4K UHD gaming visuals. It also has the MechTAG mechanical-switch keyboard, which features anti-ghosting with 30-key rollover, and customisable ROG Aura RGB LED effects for each key. G701 boasts HyperDrive RAID 0, NVMe and PCIe technologies for blazing-fast storage speeds, and a 120Hz panel with NVIDIA G-SYNC technology. G752 is driven by Intel Core i7 processor and a VR-ready NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. GL502 and GL702 are compact and potent gaming laptops that offer good performance, with up to Intel 7th Generation processors, VR-ready NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070/1060 GPUs, 120Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC panels, and backlit anti-ghosting keyboards with 30-key rollover. GT51CH is an powerful gaming desktop PC featuring an overclocked 4.8GHz Intel Core i7-7700K processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI graphics, and 64GB of RAM. G20CI is a small-form-factor gaming PC, housed in a compact 9.5-litre chassis, runs whisper-quiet at just 22dB at idle and has an efficient heat-management system, including two internal fans and copper pipes to dissipate heat. GD30 has a customisable design featuring interchangeable black and white front panels and is powered by 7th Generation Intel Core i7 processor with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics. GR8 II is the smallest gaming PC built for VR, has ASUS-customised NVIDIA GeForce 1060 GPU, 7th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, and 32GB of RAM.