NASA’s New Horizons space probe sent photographs of the area around the dwarf planet Pluto’s north pole taken during the extraordinary July 14, 2015 flyby. The images reveal a series of canyons long and wide in the polar area that at its bottom is about 1,200 km (750 miles) wide. It’s part of the region informally called Lowell Regio after the astronomer Percival Lowell, the founder of the observatory where Pluto was discovered.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes research that has uncovered the place of origin of a Fast Radio Burst (FRB). These radio signals that last only a few milliseconds are picked up with no phenomenon that might warn about its arrival. An international team of astronomers used observations made by optical and radio telescopes to trace the origin of this phenomenon.
The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of the star WR 31a, which has the characteristic of being surrounded by a bubble nebula. It’s estimated to have been created about 20,000 years ago by the impact of the strong stellar winds emitted by WR 31a and materials, especially hydrogen, ejected from it in the earlier stages of its life.
An article published in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research on the planet 55 Cancri e focused in particular on its atmosphere. This is the first study of its kind involving a super-Earth and was carried out in an innovative way using the Hubble Space Telescope. 55 Cancri e has already been the subject of several studies and about four years ago was the first super-Earth directly observed.
The analysis of the photographs of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s moons, suggests that once it had an underground ocean that at some point froze causing the expansion of its surface layer. That event could explain the presence of a very long fracture on its surface, a kind of huge scar that devastates its equator.
