October 2024

The Shenzhou 19 mission launches atop a Long March-2F rocket (Photo courtesy Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua)

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A confirmation has arrived that three Chinese taikonauts from the Shenzhou 19 mission reached the Chinese space station Tiangong with an automated docking maneuver. They blasted off about 6.5 hours earlier atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. They form the 8th crew of the Chinese space station and will remain there for about six months, the standard duration for a mission.

The galaxy NGC 1386

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports a study of the galaxy NGC 1386 that shows that star formation processes are taking place in its central regions despite the fact that it contains mostly old stars. A team of researchers led by astronomer Almudena Prieto of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain combined observations conducted in visible light and near-infrared with ESO’s VST and in radio waves with the ALMA radio telescope to study those processes that are bringing about a sort of rejuvenation within NGC 1386.

The Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft loaded onto the MV Megan ship after splashdown (Image NASA TV)

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A little while ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft concluded its Crew-8, or SpaceX Crew-8, mission for NASA by landing without problems. On board were astronauts Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, who had reached the International Space Station on March 5, 2024, and were part of Expedition 70/71/72. The four of them finished the 8th regular crewed mission of SpaceX in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Florida. The Crew Dragon departed the Station about 34 hours earlier.

Shortly after the splashdown, SpaceX’s “MV Megan” ship went to recover the Endeavour and its crew to transport them to the coast. The astronauts also received their first medical checkup aboard the ship.

The star cluster NGC 602 (Image ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb))

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the identification of 64 brown dwarf candidates in the star cluster NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. A team of researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to obtain the sensitivity and resolution needed to detect possible objects halfway between the planet and the star about 200,000 light-years away. Follow-up studies are needed to verify these candidates, the first brown dwarfs to be verified outside the Milky Way. NGC 602 is poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, a condition that was normal when the universe was young, further reason for interest in studying the processes within the cluster.

Illustration of a black hole and the region surrounding it with the corona bright at X-rays (Image NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the results of a study on the region of very hot plasma that surrounds a black hole called the corona. A group of researchers used detections conducted with the IXPE space telescope to obtain precise information on the corona of 12 black holes ranging from stellar-mass ones to supermassive black holes. For the first time, it was possible to observe the geometry of the corona of black holes and its relationship with the accretion disk that surrounds them. The geometry seems very similar regardless of the size of the black holes but this is still a tentative result.