Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, launched last Saturday, February 15, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Andrew Morgan, assisted by his colleague Jessica Meir, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Unity module after about two hours.
Three articles published in the journal “Science” report various aspects of a research on the origins and characteristics of Arrokoth, the Kuiper Belt object classified as 2014 MU69 and for some time known by the nickname Ultima Thule. Different teams of researchers with various members in common used data collected by NASA’s New Horizons space probe to study it from various points of view. One of the conclusions concerns its origin, which might have occurred following the collapse of a cloud of solid particles in the primordial solar nebula and not following the process known as hierarchical accretion, a process that has high-speed collisions between planetesimals.
A little while ago Northrop Grumman’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 13th official mission, called NG-13 or CRS NG-13, to transport supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.
An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” offers an explanation of the formation mechanisms of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs bringing evidence that these are two different mechanisms. A team of astronomers led by Brendan Bowler of the University of Texas, Austin, conducted observations at the Keck Observatory and with the Subaru Telescope, both in Hawaii, accompanied by computer simulations using the free / open source orbitize! software to try to understand if there were orbital differences that indicated a different origin between these objects. Their conclusion is that brown dwarfs have significantly more elliptical orbits.
An article accepted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports evidence that the galaxy NGC 4490 has a double nucleus. A team of researchers led by Allen Lawrence of Iowa State University studied data collected using various telescopes to find traces of two different nuclei in NGC 4490. One of the two nuclei can be seen at optical wavelengths, the other is hidden by dust and can be seen only at infrared and radio wavelengths, capable of passing through those dusts. Lawrence saw the double nucleus about seven years ago when he was an astronomy student even though at the time he was about 70 years old.
