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A team of European astronomers said that the most enticing property yet found outside our solar system is about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra. They have discovered a planet five times as massive as the earth orbiting a dim, red star known as Gliese 581.

Dr.Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory said that it orbits its home star within the so-called habitable zone where surface water, the staff of life, could exist if other conditions are right. He said that they were at the right place for that. He and other astronomers cautioned that it was far too soon to conclude that liquid water was there without more observations.

Sara Seager, a planet expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said if the planet had an atmosphere more massive than Venus’s, then the surface would likely be too hot for liquid water. The discovery in the Gliese 581 system, where a Neptune-size planet was discovered two years ago is now suspected, catapults that system to the top of the list for future generation of space missions.

Dr.Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsomian Centre for Astrophysics, who studies the structure and formation of planets, said that we can go there becauese it is 20 light-years.

An advanced spectrograph on a 141-inch-diameter telescope was used by Udry’s team at the European observatory in La Silla, Chile. The planet, Gliese 581, circles the star every 13 days at a distance of about seven million miles. According to models of planet formation developed by Sasselov and his collegues, such a planet should be about half again as large as the earth and composed of rock and water.

Although the new planet is much closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, the red dwarf Gliese 581 is only about a hundredth as luminous as the Sun. So seven million miles is a comfortable hoding distance. Using the earth and Venus as two extreme examples, Udry estimated that temperatures on the surface of the planet should be in the range of 0 degree to 40 degree centigrade.

March 26, India and the United States began the formal negotiations to facilitate the Indo-US nuclear deal, with the department of atomic energy making it clear to the government that it could not accept a bilateal agreement. This bilateral agreement did not allow India to reprocess spent fuel, stockpile nuclear fuel and recognise its right to nuclear testing.

Still it is not clear whether the fairly detailed Indian draft submitted personally by foreign secretary Shivashankar Menon to the Bush administration in Washington has been taken on board by the US at the higher level, and is on the agenda for discussions now. The DAE is keeping what sources here describe as a hawk’s eye on the negotiations, with the nuclear establishment in no mood to allow any compromise on India’s security interests.

Dr.Anil Kakodkar chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and secretary, DAE, has taken a no-non-sense position on the 123 agreement. He siad in a recent interview thar they did not want to convert this voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests into a bilateral agreement.

The moratorium on nuclear testing, he made clear, was unilateral and voluntary. The US is seeking to make this binding through the bilateral agreement. The nuclear scientists had earlier raised the issue of stockpiling fuel as well, maintaining that the March 2006 separation plan had clearly provided for building stockpiles of fuel to meet the lifetime requirements of nuclear reactors placed under IAEA safeguards.

Dr.Kakodkar said that they needed everything to be built into the 123 agreement in a very explicit manner, so that their interests were protected. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had assured Parliament that all these concerns would be met through the 123 agreement.

A Partial solar eclipse in India on March 19, saw thousands of religious-minded people taking bath in rivers and praying, while the curious gathered at planetariums to watch the celestial show. Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, blotting out the sunlight.

In Delhi, the Sun rises at 6:27 by which time 8.5 percent of the disk of the Sun was already covered in eclipse. The eclipse was witnessed at its maximum at 7.06 a.m. with more than 47 percent of the sun covered. It ended at one minute past 8a.m.

All major Hindu temples in Andhra Pradesh were closed and hundreds of men and women took a dip in the river during the eclipse. Including children, took up vamtage points to watch the eclipse with solar filters, the more religious bathed in rivers in the belief it would protect them from the ill-effects of the eclipse.

A large number of students, gathered at the Biria Planetarium in Hyderabad to watch the solar eclipse. A student said that he had read about the eclipse only in text books, but that was the first time he had watched.

All Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu and Andra Pradesh, remained shut during the eclipse. The eclipse was also visible from Russia, China, the United States, Hong Kong, Japan and the northern regions of Alaska.