Stars

Icarus (MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the observation of the most distant star and therefore also the oldest observed so far, nicknamed Icarus, about 9 billion light years from Earth. A team of researchers exploited a double gravitational lensing effect that magnified the image of the star, which was called MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1 but for that reason it’s simply called Lensed Star 1 (LS1). That effect made it become bright enough to be detectable by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Scenario of a FELT event (Image NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) )

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research that offers an explanation to a type of extremely bright event called Fast-Evolving Luminous Transient (FELT), that lasts just a few days. A team of researchers took advantage of the ability of NASA’s Kepler space telescope to accurately detect rapid changes in starlight to build a model in which a FELT event is caused by a large shell of gas and dust around a supernova, which makes it shine.

Artist's concept of the panorama on the planet TRAPPIST-1f (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC))

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research into the possible migration of the orbits of the 7 planets of the ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1’s system and their composition. A team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and Vanderbilt University put together the information available on that system to perform a series of calculations concluding that the planets formed much farther away from their star from their current positions and that some of them have a very high water content, paradoxically too much for them to be habitable.

Map of high-energy Gamma Rays (Image NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research that indicates the origin in an anomalous gamma-ray source detected for the first time in 2009 by the NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. One of the hypotheses concerned collisions of dark matter particles, instead according to a team of astronomers there are millisecond pulsars in the nucleus of the Milky Way whose emissions mixed up in the signal detected by Fermi.

Illustration of exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” shows the confirmation of 15 exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs. A team of researchers led by Teruyuki Hirano from the Tokyo Institute of Technology used data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and follow-up observations. Another article in the same journal focuses on 3 confirmed super-Earths including K2-155d, which could be in ​​its system’s habitable zone.