April 2020

Artist's concept of the two massive black holes in the OJ 287 galaxy (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports observations of a supermassive black hole passing through the disk of materials surrounding another object of the same type but even more massive in the galaxy OJ 287. A team of researchers used NASA’s Spitzer space telescope to monitor this event, which was predicted by a model created specifically to take into account the extreme environment generated in particular by the larger of the two black holes, whose mass is estimated at around 18 billion times the Sun’s. This model, from 2018, is the most recent and takes into account gravitational waves but also the no-hair theorem.

The possible orbit of an interstellar centaur asteroid

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports evidence of the interstellar origin of some asteroids of the centaur family and two transneptunian objects. Astronomer Fathi Namouni of the University of the Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, and his colleague Helena Morais of the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil, used computer simulations to reconstruct the orbits of those asteroids backwards, concluding that they’re likely interstellar asteroids captured from another system that could have been much closer when the Sun and the stars born with it had just formed.

A screenshot from a simulation of an event such as GW190412

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An article published on the arXiv server reports the observation of gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two black holes with very different masses. The scientists from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations used the data collected by their detectors to examine this merger, the first in which the mass of the two objects is so asymmetric given that the estimates made indicate that they were 8 and 30 times the Sun’s. The event, cataloged as GW190412, produced waves with shapes different from those found so far in mergers between objects of similar masses and contain information that allowed to obtain more precise measurements of the pair’s physical properties. It also made it possible to conduct new tests of the theory of general relativity, confirmed once again.

The Progress MS-14 cargo spacecraft blasting off atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket (Image NASA TV)

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A few hours ago the Progress MS-14 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 75 or 75P. After almost 3.5 hours it reached the International Space Station docking with its Zvezda module.

The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov seen by ALMA

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports a study on the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov focused in particular on its chemical composition which highlights the abundance of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide. A team of researchers led by Martin Cordiner and Stefanie Milam of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the ALMA radio telescope to examine the comet’s emissions detecting that carbon monoxide is present in its coma in an amount that is between 9 and 26 times that estimated for the solar system’s comets. This suggests that it formed in a very cold area of ​​its origin system.