July 13, 2019

The Spektr-RG space telescope blasting off atop a Proton rocket (Image courtesy Roscosmos)

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A little more than two hours ago, the Spektr-RG space telescope was launched on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. After about two hours it separated from the rocket’s upper stage to head towards the L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The Spektr-RG (Spektr-Roentgen Gamma, SRG) space telescope is a project born from a collaboration of the Russian Roscosmos and German DLR space agencies for the observation of the X-ray sky. This type of astronomy got a bit crippled by the very premature end of the Japanese Hitomi mission while ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra space telescopes are still active but these are missions that started twenty years ago.

Galaxy NGC 3147 (Image ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.)

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters” reports a study on a supermassive black hole surrounded by a disk of materials that revealed unexpected features. A team of researchers led by Stefano Bianchi, of the University of Roma Tre, Italy, used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the nucleus of the galaxy NGC 3147 discovering a small and soft disk, a reduced version of the large disks typical of active galactic nuclei, a structure that shouldn’t exist. The discovery represents a new opportunity to test some relativistic effects but could force astronomers to review certain models on active galactic nuclei.