2018

The Lagoon Nebula at visible light (Image NASA, ESA, and STScI)

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On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the Space Shuttle Discovery and put into orbit the next day. To celebrate the 28th anniversary of that event, which represents a milestone in the history of astronomy, new breathtaking photos of the Lagoon Nebula have been published.

About 4,000 light years away from the Earth, the Lagoon Nebula was first cataloged by the astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna and later included in other catalogs, so much so that it’s known by various designations including Messier 8 or M8, NGC 6523, Sharpless 25, RCW 146, and Gum 72. In optimal conditions it’s visible even to the naked eye, so it’s the object of observations by amateur astronomers as well.

Ismenia Patera (Image ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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ESA has published new images of a crater called Ismenia Patera on the planet Mars captured by the Mars Express space probe. The red planet is full of craters but this is unique because generally those formations are the result of a meteorite impact while Ismenia Patera could be what remains of a supervolcano that was active when Mars was very young. A very violent volcanic activity may have caused the destruction of other traces of a supervolcano at the same time creating the strange, somewhat irregular formation we see today.

The galaxy NGC 6240 (Image NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University))

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the formations similar to the wings of a butterfly in the galaxy NGC 6240. A team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder combined observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope, the VLT in Chile and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to study that galaxy by concluding that those particular formations are generated by different forces, in one case by a pair of supermassive black holes.

NASA's TESS space telescope blasting off atop a Falcon 9 rocket (Foto SpaceX)

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A few hours ago NASA’s TESS space telescope blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After almost 50 minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and reached a transfer orbit where it will start a number of maneuvers that in about two months will take it to the very elliptical final orbit where it will begin its scientific mission.

Almahata Sitta meteorite fragment

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An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” describes a study of microscopic diamonds discovered inside the Almahata Sitta meteorite, a fragment of a larger meteorite exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere on October 7, 2008. A team of researchers analyzed those diamonds concluding that they contain compounds that can only form within a planet, so they must be the remnants of a lost planet with a size between that of Mercury and Mars.