Astronomy / Astrophysics

Scenarios after the kilonova (Image NRAO/AUI/NSF: D. Berry)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the consequences of the merger between two neutron stars observed in the emission of both electromagnetic and gravitational waves. A team of researchers led by Kunal Mooley of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) used the Very Large Array (VLA) together with the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India for three months from the beginning of September to detect the radio waves emitted by the event at the origin of the gravitational waves recorded on August 17, 2017 in the event labeled as GW170817.

Artist's concept of the planet GJ 436b with its tail (Image courtesy Mark Garlick/University of Warwick)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the planet GJ 436b, whose orbit around its star turned out to be almost polar instead of equatorial. A team of researchers led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE)Switzerland, discovered this strange new characteristic of this exoplanet’s orbit, already known because its orbit is very eccentric and above all because it has a huge tail similar to a comet’s.

The interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua seen by the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma (Image courtesy A. Fitzsimmons, QUB/Isaac Newton Group, La Palma)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the results of a spectroscopic analysis and thermal modeling of the interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua. A team of astronomers led by Professor Alan Fitzsimmons and Dr. Michele Bannister from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast concluded that, due to its exposure to cosmic rays, a superficial layering of organic and insulating materials occurred on the asteroid and it might contain ice.

Comparison between the Kepler-90 system and the solar system (Image NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel)

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At a press conference, the annoucement came of the first exoplanets discovered thanks to the TensorFlow machine learning engine created by Google. Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained this system to make it recognize exoplanets in the data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The two exoplanets announced are Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g but it’s only the beginning for a new way to look for exoplanets, especially the smaller ones that leave very weak traces.

Simulated perspective view of Occator Crater on Ceres (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

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At the annual American Geophysical Union meeting, NASA scientists presented the results of the latest research on bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. In particular, the activity detected over time, especially by NASA’s Dawn space probe with variations in their brightness confirm the possibility that on Ceres there’s still a geological activity that is modifying this dwarf planet’s surface.