It was night in Kazakhstan when the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Peggy Whitson, Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet to ransport them to the International Space Station. It’s the third new version Soyuz spacecraft and was launched once again in the route that will take two days instead of the six-hourt fast path to keep on testing the new on-board systems.
Two articles published in the journal “Nature” offer an explanation to the reorientation of the dwarf planet Pluto’s spin axis. The heart of the matter is in the great basin of Sputnik Planitia, formerly known as Sputnik Planum, and it’s appropriate to say it because it’s in the heart-shaped region. According to one of two studies the explanation provides additional clues about the presence of an underground ocean.
An article published in “Astrophysical Journal” describes the study of a brown dwarf that orbits a K-type star that was possible thanks to a gravitational microlensing event. An international team of astronomers used NASA’s Swift and Spitzer space telescopes to take advantage of that event, cataloged as OGLE-2015-BLG-1319, at a distance from its star that at which few of those objects were found, hence the name brown dwarf desert.
Two articles to be published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describe various aspects of a research on the age of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Martin Jutzi and Willy Benz of the University of Bern, Switzerland, together with several colleagues conducted a series of computer simulations to study its two-lobed structure concluding that the collision that gave it its present shape hardly occurred over a billion years ago.
Three articles accepted for publication in the journal “Astronomy and Astrophysics” describe as many research on star systems in formation. The research were conducted by different teams of astronomers but have in common the use of the SPHERE instrument mounted on ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope), which revealed details never seen before of protoplanetary discs around the young stars RX J1615, HD 97048 and HD 135344B.
