Astronomy / Astrophysics

The New Horizons space probe has photographed its next target Ultima Thule

0

NASA has published an image captured by its New Horizons space probe in which its LORRI instrument detected Ultima Thule, the Kuiper belt object – but there may be two objects and/or a moon – that represents its next target for a flyby scheduled for New Year’s Day 2019. When the 48 photos combined in the image were taken, on August 16, 2018, New Horizons was still about 172 million kilometers (107 million miles) from Ultima Thule and being able to identify its target is positive because mission managers can start assessing any adjustments to the probe’s course.

NGC 3918 (Image ESA/Hubble and NASA)

0

A new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the planetary nebula NGC 3918, nicknamed the “Blue Planetary” or “The Southerner”. Its shape in some ways reminds of an eye with special colors and seeing it is a lucky event because it will not last long in astronomical terms since this phase will end within a few tenth of millennia.

Milky Way panorama (Image ESO/S. Brunier)

0

An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on star formation in the Milky Way. According to Masafumi Noguchi of Tohoku University there were two star formation periods separated by 2 billion years. In essence, our galaxy had a first period in which it was vital then it died and after about 2 billion years star formation restarted in a sort of second life. According to this theory, during that period of death the gas present in the Milky Way got enriched with iron, the reason why stars like the Sun have a greater amount of it than others.

The Spitzer Space Telescope getting prepared (Photo NASA)

1

On August 25, 2003, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II rocket. Its primary mission lasted 2.5 years and its success led to a series of extensions even after it ran out of the liquid helium it had on board that was used to keep some instruments at very low temperatures, which determined the end of their use.

Distribution of water ice on the Moon's polar areas

0

An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes three specific traces of the presence of water ice on the surface of the Moon. A team led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University used data collected by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper spectrometer to find traces of that ice concentrated in lunar craters at the south pole and spread in an wider area at the north pole.