2020

The Moon's surface seen by the Chang'e-5's lander, including its shadow (Photo courtesy China National Space Administration/CLEP)

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It was night in China when the lander and ascent vehicle of the Chinese Chang’e-5 mission successfully completed their Moon landing maneuvers. The various modules that make up Chang’e-5 were launched when it was November 24 in China and reached the Moon’s orbit in recent days. At that point, a series of maneuvers begun to make its orbit circular, the modules that were scheduled to land separated, and everything went well. Very soon, the lander was scheduled to begin its excavation work to collect soil and subsoil samples that will be sent into orbit to be returned to Earth around mid-December.

Emissions from 1e1547.0-5408

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An article accepted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a new analysis of observations conducted in 2009 of the magnetar cataloged as 1E1547.0-5408. A team of researchers led by GianLuca Israel of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome used data collected by the Parkes radio telescope and NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatories to search for emissions from 1E1547.0-5408. The result was the discovery of strong close emissions of X-rays and radio waves that confirm a link between magnetars and fast radio bursts, the focus of recent research.

Men at work within the Borexino experiment (Photo courtesy Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the detection of neutrinos produced by the Sun by the Borexino experiment. The scientists of the Borexino Collaboration at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics that conducted this investigation have thus obtained experimental evidence that the CNO (carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) cycle, which produces those neutrinos, powers the nuclear fusion that occurs in the solar core. This cycle is predominant in stars with a mass greater than the Sun, and this adds importance to the evidence offered to a theory developed more than 80 years ago.

CK Vulpeculae seen with Gemini North (Image International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF's NOIRLab), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin)

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An article to be published in the “Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports a research on CK Vulpeculae (CK Vul), what was considered a well documented nova having been described between 1670 and 1672, also for the bipolar nebula that left and was recently studied. A team of astronomers led by Dipankar Banerjee, Tom Geballe, and Nye Evans used the GNIRS spectrograph mounted on the Gemini North telescope to obtain measurements that led to the conclusion that CK Vulpeculae is about 10,000 light-years away from Earth, five times as far as previously estimated, and that the explosion was more powerful than a nova but not at the levels of a supernova.