2019

The galaxy Holmberg 15A (Image courtesy Juan P. Madrid & Carlos J. Donzelli)

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An article submitted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of an ultramassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Holmberg 15A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy that is the dominant central member of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. A team of astronomers led by Kianusch Mehrgan of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching bei München, Germany, used the MUSE instrument mounted on ESO’s VLT in Chile to study that galaxy estimating that the mass of that black hole is about 40 billion times the Sun’s.

In ancient times there was a dynamic environment in Gale Crater on Mars

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NASA has provided an update of its Mars Rover Curiosity’s activities in what was called a clay-bearing unit of ​​Mount Sharp on Mars. Clay is associated with water, so the goal of current research is to offer new information to reconstruct the history of Mars, in this case of Gale Crater, where in ancient times there was a lake and now there’s Mount Sharp. Lately, Curiosity has been working near an outcrop that was named “Teal Ridge” and near a rock that was named “Strathdon”, formed by dozens of sedimentary layers that suggest a more dynamic environment than other typical lake sediments.

Representation of the jet of a gamma-ray burst such as GRB 190114C (Image courtesy Kitty Yeung)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports a study on a gamma-ray burst cataloged as GRB 190114C and detected by NASA’s Swift satellite and the MAGIC telescopes at the Canaries. Professor Evgeny Derishev and Professor Tsvi Piran put together the data from these detecions, which are about photons at very different energies, concluding that the radiations detected must have originated in a jet that moved at a speed of about 99.99% of the speed of light. These are so-called ultra-high energy emissions in the Teraelettronvolt (TeV) range and they think that the mechanism of origin is the inverse Compton scattering while emissions of less energetic photons originate from synchrotron radiation.

The Gl 357 system (Image NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of three exoplanets in the system of the red dwarf GJ 357. A team of researchers led by Rafael Luque of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute identified the innermost exoplanet, named GJ 357 b, thanks to the observations conducted by NASA’s TESS space telescope while the other two, named GJ 357 c and GJ 357 d, were discovered using the radial velocity method thanks to data collected over twenty years of observations of various ground-based telescopes. The three exoplanets could all be rocky and the outermost is within ​​its star system’s habitable zone.

The Progress MS-12 cargo spacecraft approaching the International Space Station (Image NASA TV)

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A few hours ago the Progress MS-12 spacecraft blasted off atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After about nine minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and was placed on its ultra-fast track in its resupply mission to the International Space Station also called Progress 73 or 73P. After almost 3.5 hours it reached the International Space Station docking with its Pirs module.