Telescopes

Artistic representation of a gaseous planet in a binary system (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the discovery of a gaseous exoplanet in the DS Tuc binary system thanks to the use of NASA’s TESS space telescope. A team of astronomers coordinated by Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, conducted this research on the exoplanet named DS Tuc Ab, which has an estimated age of about 45 million years, a sort of preteen. It has completed its growth but it’s still in a phase in which changes take place, all useful information to understand the formation and evolution of the planets.

LTT 1445 aka LTT 1445ABC (Image NASA / ESA / Hubble)

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An article to be published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports the discovery of a super-Earth that was cataloged as LTT 1445Ab thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope in a research coordinated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This exoplanet orbits a red dwarf and from the estimates seem too close to it to have the potential to host life forms similar to the Earth’s but it’s interesting because that star has two companions, red dwarfs as well, and orbits them.

Using red giants to estimate the speed of the universe expansion

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An article being published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a new attempt to calculate the speed of the universe expansion, this time using red giant stars as a reference. A team of researchers coordinated by Carnegie Institution for Science and University of Chicago and led by astronomer Wendy Freedman used observations made with the Hubble space telescope to perform that calculation. The result has a probability peak at 69.8 km/s per megaparsec, between the values ​​calculated using the two methods that provided discrepant values.

Possible moons in formation around the exoplanet PDS 70 c

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An article published in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the observation of what is interpreted as a circumplanetary disk in the system of the young star PDS 70. A team of researchers led by Andrea Isella of Rice University in Houston, Texas, used the ALMA radio telescope to detect the emissions of that disk that surrounds the exoplanet PDS 70 c and according to the astronomers is of the type that controls the formation of planets and of a system of moons such as those around the planet Jupiter.

The Spektr-RG space telescope blasting off atop a Proton rocket (Image courtesy Roscosmos)

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A little more than two hours ago, the Spektr-RG space telescope was launched on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. After about two hours it separated from the rocket’s upper stage to head towards the L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The Spektr-RG (Spektr-Roentgen Gamma, SRG) space telescope is a project born from a collaboration of the Russian Roscosmos and German DLR space agencies for the observation of the X-ray sky. This type of astronomy got a bit crippled by the very premature end of the Japanese Hitomi mission while ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra space telescopes are still active but these are missions that started twenty years ago.