October 2021
A success for the launch of the Russian Progress MS-18 cargo spaceship to the International Space Station
A few hours ago, the Progress MS-18 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 route. The cargo spacecraft began its resupply mission to the International Space Station also called Progress 79 or 79P. In this mission, the route used is the one that requires about two days.
A galaxy protocluster shows a very high star formation rate
Two articles, one published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” and one in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”, report various aspects of the discovery of a galaxy protocluster in which there was an extraordinary rate of star formation when the universe was about 3 billion years old. A team of researchers led by Mari Polletta of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, Milan, found traces of the protocluster G237.01+42.50, or simply G237, in the data collected by the Planck Surveyor space probe and then used various telescopes to observe the galaxies inside it. The results were collected by a team led by Yusei Koyama of the National Astronomical Observatory, Japan.
An extragalactic exoplanet candidate discovered in the Whirlpool Galaxy
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports the identification of a candidate exoplanet in another galaxy, cataloged as M51-ULS-1b. A team of researchers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton Space Telescope to examine what could be the transit of a Saturn-sized exoplanet in M51, a pair of galaxies. In the larger of the two galaxies, there’s an ultra-luminous X-ray source consisting of a dead star and a blue supergiant, and the candidate exoplanet orbits them. The first confirmation of an extragalactic exoplanet would be extraordinary but in this case, not all alternative explanations can be completely ruled out.
2M0437b is a newborn planet photographed directly
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports the discovery of a newborn planet orbiting the red dwarf star 2M0437. A team coordinated by the University of Hawaii at Mānoa used various telescopes to confirm that the discovered object was a planet orbiting that star and to capture a direct image of it. 2M0437b is one of the youngest exoplanets discovered so far, born together with its star in the Taurus Cloud, a stellar nursery that has been the subject of various astronomical studies.
