A confirmation has arrived that three Chinese taikonauts from the Shenzhou 15 mission reached the Chinese space station Tiangong with an automated docking maneuver. They blasted off about seven hours earlier on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. They form the fourth crew of the Chinese space station and will remain there for about six months, the standard duration for a mission.
An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope portrays the supernova remnants cataloged as DEM L 190 or LMC N49 or by other designations observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The debris produced by the explosion of a massive star formed what appear from Earth as delicate colored filaments. Those materials projected into interstellar space could end up in other stellar systems, perhaps even in protoplanetary disks which will be enriched by the elements generated by the progenitor star and by the supernova.
A little while ago, SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Harmony module completing the first leg of its mission. It blasted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in its CRS-26 (Cargo Resupply Service 26) mission, also referred to as SpX-2, on Saturday, when it was the afternoon in the USA. Astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann monitored the operation but the cargo spacecraft completed the maneuvers in an automated way without any problems.
An article published in the journal “Nature” reports a study on the blazar Markarian 501, or simply MRK 501, which offers an explanation for the jets of particles emitted at speeds close to the speed of light. A team of researchers used NASA’s IXPE space telescope to study Markarian 501 and concluded that shock waves within the jets were the most likely explanation.
Markarian 501 is a blazar, a type of active galactic nucleus that emits powerful jets of particles at speeds approaching the speed of light. When one of its jets is aimed at Earth, this type of object is called a blazar. These objects are powered by supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of materials.
Five articles, three of which were accepted for publication in the journal “Nature” and two still under peer review, report various aspects of a study on the exoplanet WASP-39b. Many researchers participated in various ways in examining observations conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope focused in particular on the atmosphere of this very hot planet. Webb’s various instruments made it possible to detect a number of substances in WASP-39b’s atmosphere such as carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. For the first time, sulfur dioxide was detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet and indicate that photochemical reactions are taking place.
