A photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula showing the agony of a low-mass star like the Sun. This nebula is also known by the nickname Rotten Egg Nebula because its study revealed that in the gas surrounding it there’s a high concentration of sulfur, the element that causes the characteristic rotten egg smell.
A team of researchers proposed an explanation for the strange appearance of the galaxy NGC 4861, which has the characteristics of a barred spiral galaxy but it looks more like a dwarf irregular galaxy. It’s possible that there’s an ongoing production of charged particle jets during a star formation phase with the generation of galactic winds that explain the strange shape of NGC 4861, similar to a comet.
An article published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” describes an analysis of data collected during the first year of NASA’s SMAP satellite’s mission. The results were surprising, especially because the data about the soil’s upper layer has a kind of memory of weather, more than you might think from theoretical models or from incomplete surveys carried out prior to this mission.
A series of articles about to be published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes various aspects of a new calculation of the Hubble constant, the value indicating the rate of expansion of the universe. A team of the H0LiCOW collaborative used the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes to measure the Hubble constant using the effect of gravitational lensing of 5 galaxies.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the discovery of seven groups of dwarf galaxies that show the conditions for starting the merger process that will lead to form galaxies like the Milky Way. A team of researchers led by Sabrina Stierwalt of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) identified seven groups starting from data of the TiNy Titans (TNT) survey then carried out specific studies.
