July 2017

Artist's concept of a gas giant planet with a habitable exomoon (Image courtesy Andy McLatchie)

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An article sent to arXiv, the famous archive of preprint, describes the discovery of an exomoon candidate. A team of researchers led by David Kipping of Columbia University conducted a search for moons orbiting exoplanets observed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope finding the candidate called Kepler-1625b I. Generally, research results are published on a scientific journal at the end of the work but rumors spread convincing the researchers to send an article at least to arXiv.

Artist's illustration of a gamma-ray burst (Image NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the observation of a gamma-ray burst named GRB 160625B. An international team of astronomers led by Eleonora Troja of the University of Maryland used a number of telescopes after its discovery with NASA’s Fermi space telescope to detect the properties of this extremely energetic event, its geometry, the orientation of its jets and the origin of its extremely bright optical flash.

Illustration of the method to estimate a comet's size (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” describes a research on long-period comets concluding that they’re more common than expected. A team of researchers led by James Bauer of the University of Maryland used data collected by NASA’s WISE Space Telescope to discover that those at least one kilometer (0.6 miles) across are more common than expected and are, on average, twice as large as those of the Jupiter family.

Ancient volcanic deposits on the Moon (Image courtesy Milliken lab / Brown University)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” describes a research that provides evidence of the existence of large amounts of water in ancient volcanic deposits on the Moon. Ralph E. Milliken and Shuai Li of Brown University used data collected by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper Spectrometer to locate the water, perhaps formed after the collision between a planet and the primordial Earth that led to the Moon’s formation.