2019

Artist's illustration of the exoplanet LHS 3844b (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports a study of the exoplanet LHS 3844b, a super-Earth discovered in 2018 thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope. For this targeted study, a team of researchers led by Laura Kreidberg of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the Spitzer space telescope to examine its surface and see if it had an atmosphere. The result is that LHS 3844b probably doesn’t have an atmosphere or it’s very thin and is perhaps covered by materials of volcanic origin such as the lunar “mare”. In essence, more than a super-Earth it could be a super-Mercury.

The Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft during its docking attempt (Image NASA)

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A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft, which blasted off about two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, attempted to dock with the International Space Station but a communications problem forced to abort the maneuver. Cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Alexander Skvortsov are working together with the Russian space agency Roscosmos to retry the docking on Monday while the Soyuz MS-14 remains at a safe distance.

SN 2016iet is probably a pair-instability supernova

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a study on the supernova SN 2016iet. A team of researchers used a number of telescopes to collect data on it. Almost three years of study have followed its first sighting, which happened on November 14, 2016, leading to estimate that the progenitor star had a mass about 200 times the Sun’s which exploded in what appears to be the first strong case of pair-instability supernova, which ends with the star’s total destruction.

The Moon shines in gamma rays

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An analysis of the Moon’s gamma-ray brightness performed by Mario Nicola Mazziotta and Francesco Loparco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Bari, Italy, using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument revealed that at certain electromagnetic wavelengths the Moon is brighter than the Sun. It’s the result of the interaction of the Moon with cosmic rays so the observations of those gamma rays offer new information on very energetic cosmic events but also on the Moon’s environment. Studying that environment has become more important following the new projects of manned Moon missions.