Nature Hub

    From - Sky &  Telescope,   By - Monica Young,   Edited by - Amal Udawatta, This image shows the Kite, an edge-on galaxy, as well as its galactic companion Mrk 0926. These galaxies are overexposed in the image to reveal the faint trail of gas and star-forming knots (labeled with letters) that trail in a straight line for more than 1 million light-years. Zaritsky et al. / Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society September 2023 Explaining a long, straight string of gas and star-forming knots presents a challenge. A galaxy 600 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius appears to be trailing gas in a string 1.2 million light-years long. It’s the longest galactic tail ever found in visible-light images, and it poses something of a conundrum for astronomers. Dennis Zaritsky (Steward Observatory) didn’t start out looking for such a tail. He was conducting a survey for ultra-diffuse galaxies, faint galaxies with mysterious pasts that had lar...

  By Pallab Ghosh  BBC Science correspondent, Edited by Amal Udawatta IMAGE SOURCE, EPTA/STELIOS THOUKIDIDES Image caption, Artist impression: The supermassive black holes at the heart of each galaxy spiral in on each other, sending gravitational shock waves across the Universe. Scientists have picked up shock waves from the orbit of supermassive black holes at the heart of distant galaxies as they begin to merge. This may be the first direct evidence of giant black holes distorting space and time as they spiral in on each other. The theory is that this is how galaxies grow. Now astronomers may soon be able to watch it happen. These distortions are happening all the time, all across the Universe. " One of the groups that made the discovery is the European Pulsar Timing Array Consortium (EPTA), led by Prof Michael Kramer of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. He told BBC News that the discovery had the potential to change astronomers' ideas about the cosmos fo...

   From - BBC Sport News,    Edited by - Amal Udawatta, Caster Semenya won Olympic 800m gold at London 2012 and Rio 2016 The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of double 800m Olympic champion Caster Semenya in a case related to testosterone levels in female athletes. The 32-year-old South African was born with differences of sexual development (DSD) and is not allowed to compete in any track events without taking testosterone-reducing drugs. A three-time 800m world champion and 800m and 1500m Commonwealth champion, Semenya has been in a long-running dispute with World Athletics. Regulations requiring her to have hormone treatment were introduced by the governing body in 2018. Semenya has twice failed in legal battles to overturn the decision. However, the case at the ECHR was not against sporting bodies or DSD rules - but specifically against the government of Switzerland for not protecting Semenya's rights and dates back to a Swiss Supreme Court ruli...