October 03, 2013 (Current Affairs)

Punjab University is India’s top university leaving behind IIT’S and IIM’S

As per Times Higher Education results announced in London, no Indian Institute is among top 200 in the world.Punjab University is the highest ranked Indian Institution in universities ranked between 226-250. All IIT’S and IIM’s are below this ranking.

Top 20 Universities

1. California Institute of Technology
2. Harvard University
2. University of Oxford
4. Stanford University
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6. Princeton University
7. University of Cambridge
8. University of California, Berkeley
9. University of Chicago
10. Imperial College London
11. Yale University
12. University of California, Los Angeles
13. Columbia University
14. ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich
15. Johns Hopkins University
16. University of Pennsylvania
17. Duke University
18. University of Michigan
19. Cornell University
20. University of Toronto
Source: Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Distant Galaxies are powered by primordial cosmic fuel

A team of astronomers led by Neil Crighton (Max Plank Institute for Astronomy, at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne) has found the best evidence to date for a flow of pristine intergalactic gas onto a galaxy. The galaxy denoted Q1442-MD50, is so distant that it looked 11 billion light years. The primordial infalling gas resides a mere 190,000 light years from from the galaxy – relatively nearby on galactic length scales  and is revealed in silhouette in the absorption of spectrum of the more distant background quasar QSO J1444535+291905.

The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.