October 2017

Artist's concept of Mars' magnetic tail (Image Anil Rao/Univ. of Colorado/MAVEN/NASA GSFC)

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During the 49th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, the results were presented of a research that led to the discovery that the planet Mars has a magnetic tail, called magnetotail, twisted by the interaction with the solar wind. A team led by Dr. Gina DiBraccio of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used data from the MAVEN space probe to discover this phenomenon that according to the researchers is linked to the process known as magnetic reconnection.

The Ernutet crater and the organic materials (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/ASI/INAF/MPS/DLR/IDA)

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In the course of the Conference of the American Astronomical Society’s 49th Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting, SwRI (Southwest Research Institute) scientist Simone Marchi presented the results of a study on the origin of the organic compounds discovered on the dwarf planet Ceres by NASA’s Dawn space probe. There were some doubts about the possibility they had formed on Ceres but according to Marchi and his team the evidence they collected that’s the most likely theory.

Some details of Saturn rings (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

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During the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Science meeting some of the latest discoveries were presented about the planet Saturn and its rings obtained from data collected by the Cassini space probe before disintegrating in the planet’s atmosphere on September 15. Some of the results were published in “The Astrophysical Journal”.

The galaxy NGC 4993 seen from several different ESO telescopes (Image VLT/VIMOS. VLT/MUSE, MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope/GROND, VISTA/VIRCAM, VST/OmegaCAM)

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Yesterday ESO and LIGO/VIRGO collaboration held a press conference to present the results of a complex research that led to the discovery of the merger of two neutron stars observed in the emission of both electromagnetic and gravitational waves. These findings were collected in a series of articles that were published or will be published in the magazines “Nature”, “Nature Astronomy”, “Astrophysical Journal Letters” and “Physical Review Letters”.