2018

The Cygnus "J.R. Thompson" cargo spacecraft blasting off atop an Antares rocket (Image NASA TV)

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A little while ago Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop an Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), part of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) on Wallops Island. After about nine minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage went en route to its destination. This is its ninth official mission, called Orbital-9 or simply Orb-9 but also CRS OA-9, to transport supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.

Orion A (Image courtesy NSF/S. Kong, J. Feddersen, H. Arce & CARMA-NRO Orion Survey team)

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An article published in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series” describes the results of the CARMA-NRO Orion Survey, a high-resolution mapping of the molecular cloud called Orion A, one of the two giant molecular clouds in the Orion molecular cloud complex. A team of astronomers combined the observations of the CARMA and NRO radio telescopes to map the stars but also the gas movements inside the cloud.

The Ant Nebula (Image NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the discovery of laser emissions in the Ant Nebula. A team of astronomers used observations conducted with ESA’s Herschel space observatory to detect a very rare phenomenon connected to a star’s death. It suggests the presence of a binary star system in the heart of the nebula.

The galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 and in the inset the galaxy MACS1149-JD1

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of the most distant traces of oxygen ever detected. A team of astronomers used the ALMA radio telescope and ESO’s VLT telescope to observe the galaxy MACS1149-JD1, where there are traces of star formation about 250 million years after the Big Bang, a very remote era in which so far there were just some clues of possible star formation.

Example of quasar (Image ESA/Hubble & NASA)

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An article published in the journal “Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia” describes the discovery of the fastest growing supermassive black hole. A team of astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU) used data collected by ESA’s Gaia space probe, NASA’s WISE space telescope and the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory to find it. It’s a quasar, one of the brightest objects in the universe but is more than 12 billion light years away from Earth. It swallows the equivalent of the Sun’s mass every two days.