At the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held last week in The Woodlands, Texas, the latest news about the mountains of Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, were presented. NASA also presented the progress made in creating maps of this moon, a task that has to face a number of problems. All these works are based on data collected by the Cassini space probe.
At the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held last week in The Woodlands, Texas, new results were presented of the analyzes of data collected about the dwarf planet Ceres by NASA’s Dawn space probe. Some of the mission scientists presented a new color map of Ceres surface and new highly detailed pictures of Occator crater, famous for the presence of the largest among the white spots, but also other interesting craters, especially Oxo, where water was found.
An article accepted for publication in the journal “Astrophysical Journal” describes the shock wave generated by a supernova observation, captured for the first time at visible light due to strong flash that generates when erupts from the star’s surface. An international team directed by astrophysicist Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana analyzed data collected by the Kepler space telescope about 50 trillion stars to make this discovery.
An article submitted to “Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes a research on the forming planets in the HL Tauri system. An international team used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to observe new details of what appear to be the first stages of the aggregation of dust and various materials around their star.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the detection of variations in the brightness of the famous white spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. Using the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile they were observed showing for example a higher brightness during the day. One explanation is that they contain volatile materials that evaporate due to the sunlight.
