Published By: Soham Halder

Science & Space Roundup: Top News of the Day (Jan 28)

Here are today’s most important updates from the realm of Science and Space.

Noida Teen Stargazer Finds Asteroid, Earns NASA’s Nod to Name It

Daksh Malik, a Class 9 student from Shiv Nadar School, Noida, has discovered an asteroid located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, through a NASA project. The asteroid is currently named ‘2023 OG40’, denoting the year it was discovered, but Daksh Malik will soon have the honour of giving it a permanent name. He had submitted his preliminary detection of the asteroid last year, and now it has been officially confirmed by NASA as a "Provisional Discovery of a Main Belt Asteroid”. It was made possible through International Asteroid Discovery Project (IADP), a collaboration between the International Astronomy Search Collaboration (IASC), Pan-STARRS, and NASA’s Citizen Science Project.

32 Times Earth’s Size: South African Telescope Makes a Galactic Breakthrough

(Credit - X/@SKA_Africa)

Millions of normally sized radio galaxies are known to science. But by 2020 only about 800 giant radio galaxies had been found, nearly 50 years since they had been initially discovered. They were considered rare. Now, South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope has uncovered an extraordinary new giant radio galaxy nicknamed Inkathazo, meaning ‘trouble’ in the African Xhosa and Zulu languages. The plasma jets of this cosmic giant span 3.3 million light-years from end to end – over 32 times the size of the Milky Way. This discovery has given us a unique opportunity to study giant radio galaxies.

Dino vs. Croc: Fossil Tells the Tale of a Prehistoric Predator Battle

(Credit - X/@RoyalTyrrell)

A crocodile-like creature bit the neck of a flying dinosaur some 76 million years ago – and scientists have proof. Archaeologists found the fossilized neck bone of the young pterosaur in Canada’s Dinosaur Provincial Park. The researchers noted that the puncture mark does not match the shape of the teeth of dinosaur predators in this region at the time, such as the Tyrannosaurus relatives Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus. Instead, it matched the shape of a croc's tooth. “We can’t say if the pterosaur was alive or dead when it was bitten but the specimen shows that crocodilians occasionally preyed on, or scavenged, juvenile pterosaurs in prehistoric Alberta over 70 million years ago,” revealed a researcher from University of Reading associated with the study.

Dust Storm Dynamics: What’s Really Stirring Up Chaos on Mars

Monstrous dust storms often ravage Mars, engulfing the Red Planet for couple of months. Now, a new study suggests these global storms may be related to a peculiar energy imbalance recently detected across the Martian surface. The solar system's planets and moons absorb energy from the sun, but they also emit energy back into space. The difference between these two is called the radiative energy budget, or REB. Earth's annual REB is largely balanced, with the amount of solar energy absorbed roughly balancing the heat radiated over a year's time. However, Mars' southern hemisphere absorbs a lot of the sun's energy during the Red Planet's spring, and that may be causing Mars' dust storms, as per the new study.