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About 900 million years ago, there was a collision between a black hole and another compact object which resulted in gravitational waves being spewed out into space. The LIGO and VIRGO collaborations which look for gravitational waves emanating from such events have picked up this signal. Astrophysicists are keenly analysing this signal, as it could signify new insights into black hole physics or hold promise for developing gravitational wave astronomy. On August 14, the LIGO collaboration announced a ‘super-event’ alert on its GraceDB (Gravitational Wave Candidate Event Database). The event, dubbed S190814bv, after the date of its discovery, has sent waves of excitement through the astrophysics community because it is unlike any that has been detected so far. “Early analysis suggests these originated from the collision of a black hole with ‘something else’,” says Karan Jani, astrophysicist and LIGO scientist at Vanderbilt University, U.S. The ‘something else’ here could be a n...

ASEAN was preceded by an organisation formed on 31 July 1961 called the  Association of Southeast Asia  ( ASA ), a group consisting of Thailand, the Philippines, and the Federation of Malaya. ASEAN itself was created on 8 August 1967, when the foreign ministers of five countries:Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, signed the ASEAN Declaration. As set out in the Declaration, the aims and purposes of ASEAN are to accelerate economic growth, social progress, and cultural development in the region, to promote regional peace, collaboration and mutual assistance on matters of common interest, to provide assistance to each other in the form of training and research facilities, to collaborate for better utilisation of agriculture and industry to raise the living standards of the people, to promote Southeast Asian studies and to maintain close, beneficial co-operation with existing international or...