On 17th January 2025, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's Chairman and CEO, took to X to announce a research paper published in Nature that caught our attention.
An international team of scientists from China, the USA, the UK, Hungary, Austria, Germany and India, have carried out observations of the Sun using the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in the USA. Their study is published in the journal Science.
Scientists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore, University of Notre Dame, USA and Universidad de La Laguna, Spain attempt to trace out how elements form by analysing the spectra of ancient stars.
C V Vishweshwara or “Vishu” as he was known to all, was born on 6th March 1938, in Karnataka. He finished most of his schooling in Bengaluru and then his graduation in Mysore University. For his PhD, he moved to Columbia University and later to University of Maryland in USA, to work on general relativity. On returning to India, Vishu joined Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru and then later joined the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.
On 31 May 2017, three space-based observatories – India’s Astrosat, NASA’s Chandra and NASA’s and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with a ground-based observatory High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), participated in this exciting exercise and have detected a coronal explosion -- an unusually large release of plasma and magnetic field from a star – in Proxima Centauri.