A team of researchers proposed an explanation for the strange appearance of the galaxy NGC 4861, which has the characteristics of a barred spiral galaxy but it looks more like a dwarf irregular galaxy. It’s possible that there’s an ongoing production of charged particle jets during a star formation phase with the generation of galactic winds that explain the strange shape of NGC 4861, similar to a comet.
A series of articles about to be published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes various aspects of a new calculation of the Hubble constant, the value indicating the rate of expansion of the universe. A team of the H0LiCOW collaborative used the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes to measure the Hubble constant using the effect of gravitational lensing of 5 galaxies.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the discovery of seven groups of dwarf galaxies that show the conditions for starting the merger process that will lead to form galaxies like the Milky Way. A team of researchers led by Sabrina Stierwalt of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) identified seven groups starting from data of the TiNy Titans (TNT) survey then carried out specific studies.
An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” describes a research on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. Using infrared observations carried out with the SOFIA observatory a team of scientists of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, SETI and NASA’s JPL identified the presence of pyroxene, clay and carbonates that so far deceived the researchers, who thought the surface was rich in carbon compounds.
Two articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describing research on as many pulsar that allow to better understand the geometry of the plasma in their vicinity. Two independent team used NASA’s Chandra space telescope to study the pulsar Geminga, also known as PSR B0633+17, and PSR B0355+54 gathering information on the nebulas of high-energy particles called in jargon plerions generated by the pulsars.
