An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research about the internal structure of the dwarf planet Ceres. A team led by Ryan Park of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) analyzed very precisely the movements of the Dawn space probe, which is orbiting Ceres, to get clues that suggest that it’s composed of a number of layers with the densest in its core and some weak layers that include ice water.
An article published in the “Journal of Geophysical Research” describes a research funded by NASA on the atmosphere of Io, one of the “Galilean” moons of Jupiter. A group of scientists led by Constantine Tsang of the Southwest Research Institute detected the changes taking place in the atmosphere of Io, noting how it collapses when it enters Jupiter’s shadow and the temperature drops.
A photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the remains of a star that died long ago. Those are wisps of ionized gas that still emit a faint glow, the last product of the immense energy generated in a Type Ia supernova. These supernova remnants called DEM L316A are located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, about 160,000 light-years away from Earth.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research on the so-called Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB). A team of researchers led by Fiona Harrison of Caltech in Pasadena used NASA’s NuSTAR space telescope to distinguish a good part of the X-ray emission coming from supermassive black holes.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research of an object called CX330 which for some years has been mysterious and was later found to be a young star. A group of researchers led by Chris Britt of Texas Tech University used data collected from NASA’s Chandra and WISE space telescopes and others to determine its nature. It remains unclear why CX330 is so isolated.
