ESA has published the first 3D map of the Milky Way obtained from the Gaia space probe, the most detailed of its kind ever produced. It’s a catalog of more than a billion stars with data that are two hundred more accurate than those of its predecessor, Hipparcos, whose mission lasted between 1989 and 1993.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research on the globular cluster Terzan 5. An international team of astronomers led by Francesco Ferraro from the University of Bologna discovered that the stars of Terzan 5 are divided into two groups, one with an age of 12 billion years and one with an age of around 4.5 billion years, more or less like the Sun. This unique feature can help to better understand the evolution of the Milky Way.
A few hours ago NASA’s OSIRIS-REx blasted off atop an Atlas 5 411 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After nearly 55 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s Centaur last stage, after a few more minutes it deployed its solar panels and started communicating with the mission control center. At that point it started its journey to the asteroid 101955 Bennu to collect a sample and take it back to Earth.
A few hours ago the astronaut Jeff Williams and the cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin returned to Earth on the Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft, landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent about five and a half months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on March 18, 2016 as part of Expedition 47.
NASA published the first results of the Jupiter flyby the Juno space probe performed on August 27, 2016. In about six hours, Juno reached a distance of 4.200 kilometers (2,500 miles) from the planet and above all passed above both north and south poles. The result is a series of images of the aurora at infrareds with many detail never seen before.
