June 2019

Gale Crater (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS)

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NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity has detected the presence of methane on Mars. The agency hasn’t officially announced the event yet but the New York Times published the information obtained. The detection happened on Wednesday, June 19, and was received by NASA the next day. On Friday, Curiosity mission’s scientists discussed the news reorganizing the weekend activities to carry out a follow-up experiment. There’s no evidence that it was produced by biological processes but methane detections on Mars are always of great interest to scientists.

Uranus and its rings seen by ALMA (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); Edward M. Molter and Imke de Pater))

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports new observations at infrareds and millimeter wavelengths of the planet Uranus and its rings. Imke de Pater and Edward Molter conducted observations with the ALMA radio telescope while Michael Roman and Leigh Fletcher conducted observations with the VLT. For the first time the temperature of the rings was measured, which turned out to be around 77 Kelvin. These observations also help to better understand the rings’ composition and the differences compared to those of the other planets.

Two Earth-sized planets discovered in the nearby Teegarden's Star system

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An article being published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of two planets with a mass close to that of the Earth around Teegarden’s Star, a tiny star about 12.5 light years from Earth and therefore one of the closest. A team of researchers led by the German University of Göttingen used the CARMENES instrument mounted on the Spanish 3.6-meter telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory, Spain, to conduct one of the recent research focused on small stars.

The dwarf galaxy ESO 495-21 (Image ESA/Hubble, NASA)

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An image captured by the Hubble space telescope shows the dwarf galaxy ESO 495-21, really small having an estimated total mass of around 10 billion solar masses, about 3% of the Milky Way. The astronomers’ interest in ESO 495-21 is due to the fact that, despite its small size, it’s of the starburst type, which means that it has a fast rate of star formation, and has at its center a supermassive black hole with a mass estimated at at least one million solar masses. It’s a case that could be similar to the first galaxies of the universe and supports the hypothesis that the dwarf galaxy formed around a black hole that already existed before.

Saturn rings sculpted by nearby moons

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An article published in the journal “Science” reports new details on Saturn rings and the moons that orbit embedded in them, in particular Daphnis, in the space inside the Ring A called Keeler Division. A team of researchers used data collected by the Cassini space probe during the last months of its mission to better understand their composition and how the nearby moons sculpt them generating a greater complexity than expected. A second article written by Shigeru Ida comments on this new study.