Stars

Artist's concept of the brown dwarf BDR J1750+3809 with its magnetic field and aurorae (Image ASTRON/Danielle Futselaar)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the confirmation of the first detection of a brown dwarf through radio observations. This is the result of a collaboration between various entities that led to the use of the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope, the Gemini North telescope, and NASA’s InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF), both in Hawaii, to discover and characterize the brown dwarf cataloged as BDR J1750+3809. Being able to locate very faint objects with a radio telescope represents a significant advance because it will help to learn more about brown dwarfs and offers the hope of even finding exoplanets ejected from their star systems.

The Milky Way's bulge (Image CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Image processing: W. Clarkson (UM-Dearborn), C. Johnson (STScI), and M. Rich (UCLA), Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin.)

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Two articles published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” report different aspects of a research on what is commonly called the bulge, a large group of stars in the central area of ​​the Milky Way. A team of researchers used the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to conduct observations of the bulge, with its 250 million stars among which in particular the ultraviolet emissions of the ones in the cluster known as red clump were detected because it’s formed by red giants. By analyzing their emissions it was possible to find the spectroscopic traces of the chemical elements inside more than 70,000 stars. The red giants near the center of the Milky Way showed a very similar composition indicating that they formed around the same time, over 10 billion years ago.

Artist's concept of a magnetar and its magnetic field (Image courtesy McGill University Graphic Design Team)

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Four articles published in the journal “Nature” report as many studies connected to a fast radio burst cataloged as FRB 200428, whose origin has been associated with a magnetar cataloged as SGR 1935+2154. The CHIME/FRB collaboration reported the observations conducted with the CHIME radio telescope, the second team of researchers reported the observations conducted with the STARE2 radio telescope, the third team reported the observations conducted with the FAST radio telescope, Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, USA, published an article on the physical mechanisms of fast radio bursts.

Artistic representation of Barnard's Star with a rocky planet hit by a flare with an X-ray component

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports a study on the potential impact of the activity of a red dwarf several billion years old such as Barnard’s Star on the potential habitability of its planets. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to keep an eye on Barnard’s Star and its flares observing one X-ray flare in June 2019 and two ultraviolet flares in March 2019. Basically, even if a red dwarf becomes quieter over time, its flares can still erode the atmosphere of a rocky planet.

Two dusty galaxies detected by ALMA (Image B. Saxton NRAO/AUI/NSF, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), ALPINE team)

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Eight articles published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” report as many studies connected to the ALPINE (ALMA Large Program to Investigate C+ at Early Times) project, conducted using the ALMA radio telescope in 70 hours of far infrared observations of 118 galaxies in the early universe. The researchers who conducted the various studies discovered among other things galaxies that are more mature than primordial, in the sense that they contain a significant amount of dust and metals, a situation found in galaxies where many stars were already produced and exploded into supernovae. This is a confirmation that the first cases of galaxies that were already mature when the universe was still young were not isolated.