A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-9 (Cargo Resupply Service 9) mission for NASA splashing down smoothly in the Pacific Ocean a little more than 420 kilometers (about 326 miles) off the coast of California. The Dragon left the International Space Station a few hours before.
Yesterday ESO held a press conference to announce that probably they discovered an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the solar system. A team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé from Queen Mary University of London found what was called Proxima b, a planet a little more massive than the Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of its star.
An article published in the journal “Geology” describes the study of the remains of a system of ancient riverbeds in the region of the planet Mars called Arabia Terra. A team of scientists led by Joel Davis of the University College London analyzed high-resolution photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) space probe to find traces of rivers that flowed nearly 4 billion years ago. This is another confirmation of the fact that at that time the climate on Mars was warm and wet, similar to the Earth.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the discovery of a protostar called G11.92-0.61 MM1. A team of astronomers led by John Ilee from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, UK, identified this object in a key stage in the birth of a star. It has a mass that is already more than thirty times that of the Sun and is still attracting materials from the molecular cloud in which it’s forming.
An article accepted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research on the exoplanet GJ 1132b, taken as an example of a rocky planet orbiting close to a red dwarf star. A team of astronomers led by Laura Schaefer of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) used computer models to simulate the evolution of that type of planet’s atmosphere concluding that could be thin and contain oxygen.
