SpaceIL lander (Image courtesy SpaceIL)

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The Google Lunar XPRIZE announced the $1 million Diversity Prize, which will be split among the 16 teams participating in the competition. The most important announcement concerns the 5 teams that are advancing to the final phase of the competition having proved they have valid contracts for the launch of their vehicle to the Moon by December 31, 2016. The final goal is to bring a robotic spacecraft to the Moon that after the landing has to travel at least 500 meters on the surface and send images and data back to Earth.

Section of Ceres with the materials at and just below its surface (Image Pierre Vernazza, LAM–CNRS/AMU)

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” describes a research on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. Using infrared observations carried out with the SOFIA observatory a team of scientists of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, SETI and NASA’s JPL identified the presence of pyroxene, clay and carbonates that so far deceived the researchers, who thought the surface was rich in carbon compounds.

The pulsars Geminga and PSR B0355+54 with the illustration of their plerions (Image X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/B.Posselt et al; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Illustration: Nahks TrEhnl)

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Two articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describing research on as many pulsar that allow to better understand the geometry of the plasma in their vicinity. Two independent team used NASA’s Chandra space telescope to study the pulsar Geminga, also known as PSR B0633+17, and PSR B0355+54 gathering information on the nebulas of high-energy particles called in jargon plerions generated by the pulsars.

The solar disc seen by ALMA (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

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The first images of the Sun generated by observations carried out using the ALMA radio telescope have been published. This is the first time that the largest radio telescope in the world has been used in this way and this is the beginning of an important expansion in ALMA’s use. The first results are details of the Sun’s chromosphere such as a sunspot twice the size of Earth.

Elements of life

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At the 229th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society held recently, astronomers of the SDSS/APOGEE project announced the results of a study that included more than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way. Each star was analyzed to determine the amount of nearly two dozen chemical elements, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, the ones that form life’s building blocks.