A few hours ago the Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. After about twenty minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and was placed on its route. It’s in its fifth official mission, called Orbital-6 or simply Orb-6 but also CRS OA-6, of supply transport to the International Space Station for NASA.
An article submitted to “Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes a research on the forming planets in the HL Tauri system. An international team used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to observe new details of what appear to be the first stages of the aggregation of dust and various materials around their star.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the detection of variations in the brightness of the famous white spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. Using the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile they were observed showing for example a higher brightness during the day. One explanation is that they contain volatile materials that evaporate due to the sunlight.
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the discovery of what was called the BOSS Great Wall, a supercluster more than a billion light years long and between 4.5 and 6.4 billion light years from the Earth. With an estimated mass of 10,000 times that of the Milky Way, it’s the largest supercluster discovered so far.
