March 2018

Artist's concept of New Horizon's Ultuma Thule flyby (Image NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Steve Gribben)

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NASA has announced that it chose Ultima Thule as a nickname for 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt Object that represents the next target for its New Horizons space probe. In recent months, the mission team asked for suggestions on the Internet and then opened a ballot allowing to select the favorite among the nicknames selected among the thousands of proposals. The result is not an official name, which must be ratified by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), because it’s not clear if Ultima Thule is a single object.

Illustration of exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” shows the confirmation of 15 exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs. A team of researchers led by Teruyuki Hirano from the Tokyo Institute of Technology used data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and follow-up observations. Another article in the same journal focuses on 3 confirmed super-Earths including K2-155d, which could be in ​​its system’s habitable zone.

The Orion Nebula

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes a new study of the Orion Nebula. A combination of observations made with the ALMA radio telescope, the 30-meter IRAM telescope and the HAWK-I instrument installed on ESO’s VLT allowed the creation of a unique image of the Orion Nebula. It’s an area of ​​space in which there are various molecular clouds where gas concentrations give life to new stars in processes that can be best studied by putting together the data collected at different electromagnetic frequencies.

Cyclones at Jupiter's north pole (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)

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Four articles published in the journal “Nature” describe as many researches on the planet Jupiter. Different teams of researchers focused on different phenomena using data collected by NASA’s Juno space probe. The researches concerns groups of huge cyclones present in Jupiter’s polar regions, wind flows that extend up to thousands of kilometers of depth, the stripes of the atmosphere that rotate at different speeds and the asymmetries in the planet’s gravitational field.

The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on August 6, 2014 (Image ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research that offers new clues about the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s formation. A team led by Stephen Schwartz of the University of Côte d’Azur and the University of Arizona conducted a series of computer simulations to study the formation of comets like this one, formed by two lobes, expanding previous studies confirming them and offering an explanation to some of its characteristics.