After over 200 days in space, ISS crew back on Earth

Moscow: A US-Russian space crew landed safely on Friday in the steppes of Kazakhstan, greeted with extra precautions amid the coronavirus pandemic. Following a stint on the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan and Russian Oleg Skripochka touched down as scheduled at 11:16 am on Friday. Their Soyuz landing capsule landed under a striped orange-and-white parachute about 150 km southeast of Dzhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan. Russian officials said they took stringent measures to protect the crew amid the pandemic. The crew will be under close medical observation for nearly a month, including tests for coronavirus. Morgan wrapped up a 272-day mission on his first flight into space while, Meir and Skripochka spent 205 days in space. AP

Star’s strange moves near black hole proves Einstein right

London: After nearly 30 years of monitoring, scientists have found that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves in a very strange way - just as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity, said the study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The observations were made with Very Large Telescope (VLT) operated by ESO, the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe. IANS

Smoke from wildfires near Chernobyl engulfs Ukraine

kyiv: Smoke from wildfires in the contaminated evacuation zone around the wrecked Chernobyl nuclear power plant has engulfed Kyiv, placing the Ukrainian capital near the top of the global air pollution index. The authorities said on Friday that radiation levels in Kyiv have remained normal, but they advised residents to stay home and close their windows. About 1,000 firefighters backed by aircraft have been deployed to battle the forest blazes near the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, which took place 34 years ago. AP