2016
Strange variations in the white spots on Ceres
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the detection of variations in the brightness of the famous white spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. Using the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile they were observed showing for example a higher brightness during the day. One explanation is that they contain volatile materials that evaporate due to the sunlight.
The BOSS Great Wall is the biggest galaxy supercluster discovered so far
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the discovery of what was called the BOSS Great Wall, a supercluster more than a billion light years long and between 4.5 and 6.4 billion light years from the Earth. With an estimated mass of 10,000 times that of the Milky Way, it’s the largest supercluster discovered so far.
The ExoMars program’s TGO and the lander Schiaparelli have been successfully launched
ESA and Roscosmos’ TGO spacecraft and Schiaparelli lander launched atop a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After about 10 minutes, the Breeze M upper stage separated and began the ten and a half hours of maneuvers that will take them out of the Earth’s orbit and en route to the planet Mars.
The ice of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko formed together with the solar system
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes an analysis conducted on data collected by ESA’s Rosetta space probe’s ROSINA instrument that allowed to established that the ice on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a crystalline form. It may seem a trivial problem, however such nature implies that it originated in the protosolar nebula and is as old as the solar system.
