A few hours ago the Aeolus satellite was launched on a Vega rocket from the Kourou base in French Guiana. After almost 55 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and entered its Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 320 kilometers (about 200 miles), from where it will study winds globally.
An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes three specific traces of the presence of water ice on the surface of the Moon. A team led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University used data collected by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper spectrometer to find traces of that ice concentrated in lunar craters at the south pole and spread in an wider area at the north pole.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research on the planetary nebula HuBi 1. Normally that kind of structure marks a phase of a star’s agony but in this case a team of researchers discovered an nebula that’s inside-out. Their conclusion is that the star at its center is going through a sort of rebirth process so we see it while it’s ejecting materials from its surface and creating a shock wave that excites the nebula’s materials.
An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal Letters” presents the first results of a pilot program to investigate at the highest possible frequencies for the ALMA radio telescope. A team of researchers used the NGC 6334I star formation region within the Cat’s Paw Nebula as a target for observations in what is called band 10 detecting glycolaldehyde and a compact bipolar outflow containing heavy water and carbon monosulfide from the protostar MM1B.
An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series” presents the Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey program, a great panorama of the universe’s evolutionary history based on observations carried out with the Hubble Space Telescope. A team of researchers exploited Hubble’s ultraviolet detection capabilities, combining it with infrared and visible light observations, also from other telescopes, to extend previous surveys with a field of view that includes about 15,000 galaxies, including 12,000 in which there’s star formation.
