NASA activated a new section of its website to host the application Vesta Trek, which aims to provide a detailed view of the giant asteroid Vesta. This application works in browsers allowing anyone to explore Vesta in detail thanks to its interactive maps. Among its tools, there’s also one that allows you to export topographic elements to recreate them with a 3D printer.
During the past weekend, ESA’s space probe Rosetta has taken a new flyby about 14 kilometers (about 8.6 miles) away from the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This means that it hasnt come as close as in February, however, the comet’s increasing activity caused some problems in Rosetta. Among the consequences, it had serious difficulties in communicating with ESA’s mission control.
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the results of a research carried out by combining the observations made with ESA’s Herschel and Planck space telescopes. The purpose was to find protoclusters, the precursors of today’s galaxy clusters seen in the distant past when the universe was only three billion years. This will help to understand how these huge groups of tens, hundreds and even thousands of galaxies formed and evolved.
A combined use of the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes allowed to conduct a study of dark matter and the results were described in an article published in the journal “Science”. Currently we have no instruments to directly detect dark matter so scientists have to study it indirectly through its effects, in this case on 72 galaxy clusters to study their behavior.
In the journal “Science” an article was just published that discusses a research conducted by an international team of scientists who found evidence that supernovae can generate a sufficient amount of material that can later create new planets like Earth. This team, led by Ryan Lau of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, studied in particular a supernova that exploded about 10,000 years ago using a special instrument, the airborne telescope SOFIA.
