Astronomy / Astrophysics

Origin of a non-repeating fast radio burst pinpointed

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An article published in the journal “Science” reports the localization of the point of origin of a non-repeating fast radio burst. A team of researchers led by Keith Bannister of CSIRO (Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization) discovered the fast radio burst cataloged as FRB 180924 with the ASKAP radio telescope and then proceeded using the Keck, Gemini South and VLT telescopes to pinpoint its origin in a galaxy about 3.6 billion light years away. Before this result, only the origin of a repeating fast radio burst was pinpointed.

Titan northern hemisphere (Image NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute)

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At the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference being held in Bellevue, Washington, Morgan Cable of NASA’s JPL presented the results of a study conducted with other researchers on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This team recreated in lab some conditions existing in the lakes of methane and other hydrocarbons of Titan, discovering that a co-crystal of solid acetylene and butane could be produced with the formation of ring-shaped deposits around those lakes similarly to salt deposits which are produced when water evaporates in the Earth’s seas. Those co-crystals could be used by exotic life forms in a way similar to carbon dioxide on Earth.

Uranus and its rings seen by ALMA (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); Edward M. Molter and Imke de Pater))

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports new observations at infrareds and millimeter wavelengths of the planet Uranus and its rings. Imke de Pater and Edward Molter conducted observations with the ALMA radio telescope while Michael Roman and Leigh Fletcher conducted observations with the VLT. For the first time the temperature of the rings was measured, which turned out to be around 77 Kelvin. These observations also help to better understand the rings’ composition and the differences compared to those of the other planets.

Two Earth-sized planets discovered in the nearby Teegarden's Star system

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An article being published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of two planets with a mass close to that of the Earth around Teegarden’s Star, a tiny star about 12.5 light years from Earth and therefore one of the closest. A team of researchers led by the German University of Göttingen used the CARMENES instrument mounted on the Spanish 3.6-meter telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory, Spain, to conduct one of the recent research focused on small stars.

The dwarf galaxy ESO 495-21 (Image ESA/Hubble, NASA)

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An image captured by the Hubble space telescope shows the dwarf galaxy ESO 495-21, really small having an estimated total mass of around 10 billion solar masses, about 3% of the Milky Way. The astronomers’ interest in ESO 495-21 is due to the fact that, despite its small size, it’s of the starburst type, which means that it has a fast rate of star formation, and has at its center a supermassive black hole with a mass estimated at at least one million solar masses. It’s a case that could be similar to the first galaxies of the universe and supports the hypothesis that the dwarf galaxy formed around a black hole that already existed before.