An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the measurement of a spectral line of an antihydrogen atom. The ALPHA experiment at CERN, which is specifically intended to conduct experiments on anti-hydrogen to better understand antimatter’s characteristics, managed to trap an anti-atom to examine it with a laser and to establish that its spectral characteristics are identical to those of hydrogen.
Two articles published in the magazines “Science” and “Nature Astronomy” describe two studies also presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting taking place in San Francisco that reported new evidence of the presence of water ice below the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. The researchers used the data collected by NASA’s Dawn space probe to find two sets of evidence that in Ceres’s subsoil there’s more ice than expected and that it can exist for a very long time.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research about ASASSN-15lh, which had been classified as a superluminous supernova after it was discovered in 2015. An international team led by Giorgos Leloudas of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and the Dark Cosmology Centre, Denmark, examined the observations made with various telescopes and concluded that it was actually a star destroyed by a supermassive black hole.
An article published in the journal “Physical Review Letters” describes the evidence of the presence of two newborn planets in the HD 163296 star system. A team of astronomers led by Andrea Isella of the Rice University in Houston used the ALMA radio telescope to study two major gaps that have left a mark in both the dust and in gas portion of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the star.
A little while ago the HTV-6 “Kounotori” spacecraft has been captured by the robotic arm Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, operated by Shane Kimbrough with the assistance of Thomas Pesquet. The Japanese space cargo ship, which blasted off last Friday, carries a huge amount of supplies and experiments. After its capture, it will take a little while before the HTV-6 starts getting moved to its berthing location on the Harmony module.
