2017

Artist's concept of the orbits of 3 stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way (Image ESO/M. Parsa/L. Calçada)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes an analysis of the motions of stars that orbit the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, particularly the one known as S2. A team of astronomers applied a new analytical technique to observations conducted in the past with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and other telescopes concluding that those orbits are influenced by the effects of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes a research involving 16 of the brightest known quasars. A team of researchers led by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) examined in particular those quasars’ infrared emissions to identify young hot stars in the galaxies hosting them concluding that a lot of them are forming, at a rate up to about 4,000 times higher than in the Milky Way.

Dark Energy Survey's map (Image Chihway Chang/Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago/DES Collaboration)

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The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration presented a map of dark matter at the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields at Fermilab created using gravitational lensing effects from 26 million galaxies. These results show the composition of the recent universe and are very close to the predictions based on the map created upon measurements the primeval universe of ESA’s Planck Surveyor satellite.

Artist's representation of WASP-121b (Image NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STSci))

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the observation of the stratosphere of an exoplanet called WASP-121b, a hot Jupiter with an orbit very close to its star. A team of researchers led by Tom Evans of the University of Exeter used the Hubble Space Telescope to study it and find evidence that it has a stratosphere, a layer of its atmosphere where the temperature gets higher than that of its lower layers. It could be the first exoplanet that was proven to have a stratosphere.

Artist’s concept of 2014 MU69 as a pair of asteroids (Image NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker)

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NASA has communicated the results of the observations of 2014 MU69, the object in the Kuiper Belt that represents the next target for the New Horizons space probe. The study of the observations made on July 17, 2017 when 2014 MU69 passed in front of a star suggests that it has the shape of an extreme prolate spheroid or that it’s actually two asteroids very close if not in contact.