A little while ago the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft, which blasted off about two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crew members. The astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold of NASA and the cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos now complete the Expedition 55 crew.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research into the possible migration of the orbits of the 7 planets of the ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1’s system and their composition. A team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and Vanderbilt University put together the information available on that system to perform a series of calculations concluding that the planets formed much farther away from their star from their current positions and that some of them have a very high water content, paradoxically too much for them to be habitable.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the oceans that formed on Mars when the planet was young. A team of geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley provided what are believed to be evidence of a connection between those oceans’ formation and the volcanic system of the Tharsis region, the largest of the solar system, which might have warmed the surface enough to keep water liquid for a long time.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research that indicates the origin in an anomalous gamma-ray source detected for the first time in 2009 by the NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. One of the hypotheses concerned collisions of dark matter particles, instead according to a team of astronomers there are millisecond pulsars in the nucleus of the Milky Way whose emissions mixed up in the signal detected by Fermi.
