Betelgeuse seen by the SPHERE instrument in December 2019 (Image ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a study of the star Betelgeuse that concludes that it’s smaller and closer to Earth compared to previous measurements. A team of researchers led by Dr. Meridith Joyce of the Australian National University (ANU) used observations conducted using the Coriolis satellite’s SMEI instrument before it started dimming and three different modeling methods to conclude that its radius is about 764 times the Sun’s, its mass is between 16.5 and 19 times the Sun’s and its distance is about 548 light-years from the Earth.

Pigafetta Montes and Elcano Montes on Pluto and the Alps

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An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” reports a study that offers an explanation for the origin of the snowpack existing on the highest mountains of the dwarf planet Pluto that create a sort of alpine panorama since it resembles in many ways the Earth’s Alps. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA’s New Horizons space probe to figure out that the snow is mainly composed of methane. This compound can become solid under the conditions present on Pluto and forms that mantle through a process that’s very different from that one that leads to alpine snowfall.

The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft docking with the International Space Station (Image NASA TV)

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A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after a little more than three hours reached the International Space Station with three astronauts on board: Kate Rubins, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. For the first time, the ultra-fast route was used which halves the journey duration. In the period preceding a launch, it’s normal for astronauts and cosmonauts to remain in quarantine. In this case it was also extended to the personnel who managed the launch, with limits to the people who could have been in Baikonur.

Artist's concept of tidal disruption event (Image ESO/M. Kornmesser)

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports a study on a tidal disruption event cataloged as AT2019qiz in which it was possible to see the phases in which a star was destroyed by a supermassive black hole. A team of researchers led by astrophysicist Matt Nicholl from the British University of Birmingham used various telescopes including ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and New Technology Telescope (NTT) and NASA’s Spitzer space observatory to follow this event, which lasted about six months, with the star’s “spaghettification” and about half of it swallowed by the black hole.

Artistic representation of the newborn black hole which has a distorted shape with a cusp along with the emissions of gravitational waves

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An article published in the journal “Communications Physics” reports a study on black hole mergers that shows the relationship between the gravitational signal emitted by that event and the shape of the black hole produced by it. A team of researchers led by Juan Calderón Bustillo – Marie Curie Fellow of the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, created computer simulations of these mergers establishing that the shape of the black hole produced, distorted during the moments while it’s settling and similar to a chestnut, influence the characteristics of gravitational waves. The “chirps”, as the multiple frequency peaks produced in the gravitational emissions, could be detected if the line of sight were parallel to the merger’s orbital plane.