Astronomy / Astrophysics

Artist's concept of the HR 6819 system

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of a black hole in a triple system known as HR 6819. A team of researchers led by ESO’s Thomas Rivinius used the FEROS spectrograph on the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope at La Silla to examine that system in a study on binary systems, surprisingly discovering the presence of a third object identified as a black hole. It’s the closest black hole to the solar system, but according to the researchers it could be the tip of the iceberg, and there could be many others like that, as predicted by theoretical models.

Europa seen by the Galileo space probe

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NASA has published reprocessed versions of three old photos of areas of the surface of Jupiter’s large moon Europa taken by the Galileo space probe on September 26, 1998. NASA scientists applied some processing techniques developed in recent years to the images obtaining new details of a series of geological features existing at the time on Europa’s frozen surface. This result offers is immediately useful for scientists interested in studying this moon and for the future because NASA is preparing the Europa Clipper mission, which also aims to try to understand what’s hidden in Europa’s underground ocean, with the hope to find life forms.

The 15 protoplanetary disks photographed by the VLTI

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the first case of high-resolution infrared observations of the internal areas of 15 protoplanetary disks performed by combining the four telescopes of the ESO VLT interferometer in Chile. A team of researchers led by Jacques Kluska of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium used the PIONIER instrument to achieve this result, which also shows traces of planetary formation. This type of observation offers new information on this process.

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.