NASA has published a comparative analysis of the spectral measurements of three moons of the dwarf planet Pluto which prove that in particular Nyx but also Hydra have a surface covered in water ice. The New Horizons space probe’s LEISA instrument carried out the measurements during the July 14, 2015 flyby. Unfortunately the location of the other two small moons, Styx and Kerberos in those hours didn’t allow spectral measurements.
At the end of last week at CERN the first particle beam was sent through the AWAKE experiment, a test of a proof-of-concept of a new type of particle accelerator. It’s currently still under construction but when finished it will prove the possibility to build plasma accelerators in which wakefield acceleration allows to build accelerators a hundred times smaller than the current ones.
A little while ago the astronauts Tim Kopra and Tim Peake and the cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko returned to Earth on the Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft, landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent about six months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on December 15, 2015 as part of Expedition 46.
During a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego, the second detection of gravitational waves from the merging of two black holes by the LIGO experiment was announced. It is a different event from the first, historic, one announced on February 11, 2016: this time the merger took place about 1.4 billion years ago and was detected on Earth on December 26, 2015. The event is also described in a article published in the journal “Physical Review Letters”.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes the study of the planet’s characteristics circumbinary Kepler-1647b. By using the Kepler space telescope NASA, a team of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the San Diego State University led by Veselin Kostov discovered this planet that orbits two stars. This is not the first case of this kind but it’s the biggest and its year is longer, about three Earth’s years.
