Massimo Luciani

The Dragon cargo spacecraft as seen by astronaut Don Pettit while departing the International Space Station to end its CRS-31 mission

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A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-31 (Cargo Resupply Service 31) mission for NASA splashing down smoothly off the Florida Coast. The Dragon left the International Space Station about 24 hours earlier. For SpaceX, this was the 11th mission of the 2nd contract with NASA to transport supplies to the Station with the new version of the Dragon cargo spacecraft.

Shortly after the splashdown, SpaceX’s “MV Megan” recovery ship went to retrieve the Dragon to transport it to the coast. The cargo brought back to Earth will be delivered to NASA within a few hours. The Dragon spacecraft reached the International Space Station on November 5, 2024.

The NGC 346 cluster with 10 circled stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks (Image NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, O. C. Jones (UK ATC), G. De Marchi (ESTEC), M. Meixner (USRA))

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the results of the study of a group of protoplanetary disks with an age of up to 30 million years, even 10 times older than current models of planet formation predict. A team led by Guido De Marchi of ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre used observations conducted with the James Webb space telescope of the cluster NGC 346, in the Small Magellanic Cloud. That region is characterized by a limited amount of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, just like the early universe. This study confirms that in those conditions, protoplanetary disks can last much longer than astronomers thought.

On the left the galaxy cluster MACS J1423.8 + 2404 with a zoom of the area in which the Firefly Sparkle galaxy and its companions are located

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the results of the study of a primordial galaxy that has characteristics similar to those attributed to the Milky Way shortly after its formation. A team of researchers led by Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley College in Massachusetts nicknamed it Firefly Sparkle after observing it using the James Webb Space Telescope and with the help of a gravitational lens within the Canadian Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) with the NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments. The observations also included two companions, two galaxies that appear to be gravitationally bound to Firefly Sparkle.

The center of the Centaurus galaxy A and the source C4 (Image NASA/CXC/SAO/D. Bogensberger et al.; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)

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An article published in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the results of X-ray observations of the jets emitted by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Centaurus A galaxy. A team of researchers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to find a V-shaped structure that indicates that one of the jets hit something whose nature is uncertain. Only Chandra’s X-ray observations revealed that unusual structure, cataloged as C4, while many other instruments, especially radio telescopes, had never shown such anomalies.

A group of galaxies observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image NASA, ESA, CSA)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the results of a new measurement of the universe’s expansion rate obtained using observations conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope that confirms previous results obtained with Hubble. A team of researchers led by Adam Riess, who has been investigating the expansion of the universe for years, verified that the so-called Hubble tension, as the discrepancy between different measurements is called, was not due to limitations of the Hubble Space Telescope. According to Riess, this result confirms that our cosmological models are incomplete and there may be something we don’t yet understand about the universe.