The Dragon space cargo ship blasting off atop a Falcon 9 rocket in its CRS-15 mission (Image NASA TV)

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A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in its CRS-15 (Cargo Resupply Service 15) mission, also referred to as SPX-15. After just over ten minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 15th mission for the Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.

The TMC1A system

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the discovery that dust particles in a disk surrounding a protostar start coagulating even before the star has completed its formation. A team of researchers used the ALMA radio telescope to study the system in formation TMC1A noting the lack of radiation from carbon monoxide near the protostar. Their conclusion is that large dust particles are blocking those radiations, an important discovery because it means that in the disk of gas and dust the processes that will lead to the formation of planets have already begun.

Asteroid Ryugu

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The Japanese space agency JAXA has confirmed that its space probe Hayabusa 2 has reached the asteroid Ryugu. It’s now at an altitude of about 20 kilometers and from there it will begin a series of observations of the surface in order to find the most suitable area to land. That maneuver will take place in October 2018 at a date yet to be determined.

MRK 1216

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An article to be published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research on isolated galaxies with a mass similar to the first elliptical galaxies but much smaller in which the central supermassive black hole inhibited stellar formation and grew more than normal. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to examine the galaxies MRK 1216 and PGC 032873, nicknamed red nuggets, relics of the first massive galaxies that formed in the first billion years after the Big Bang.

Artist's concept of the blazar OJ 287

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research on a blazar, a type of active galactic nucleus, known as OJ 287. A team of researchers led by Silke Britzen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, studied this blazar, which has long been known and left the astronomers puzzled by its variations in brightness. The cause could be in the presence of two black holes or a misaligned accretion disk.