On April 25, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was put into orbit after being launched the day before on the Space Shuttle Discovery. To celebrate that event’s 27th anniversary representing a milestone in the history of astronomy, one of the many breathtaking photographs that accompanied Hubble’s activity was published, which in this case portrays two galaxies together, NGC 4302 and NGC 4298.
An article published in the journal Science Advances describes the detection of a protostar named HH 212 that is feeding on an accretion disk. A team led by Chin-Fei Lee of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA, Taiwan) used the ALMA radio telescope to capture a moment of still little known phase of formation of stars and perhaps even of their planets.
The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, launched on April 18, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Peggy Whitson, assisted by her colleague Thomas Pesquet, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Harmony node after about two hours.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of a super-Earth called LHS 1140b. A team led by Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the HARPS instrument installed on ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile, to study that exoplanet after identifying it with the MEarth-South telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Its location in its solar system’s habitable zone makes it particularly interesting.
