Telescopes

A verification of dark matter heating

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports confirmations to the hypothesis of the effect known as dark matter heating. A team of researchers looked for the effects of the presence of dark matter in dwarf galaxies relatively close to the Milky Way, finding the confirmation that star formation can heat it causing it to move outwards. It’s a new possibility to study dark matter to try to understand its nature.

Great telescopes to study Comet 46P/Wirtanen

Various telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the SOFIA flying telescope and the ALMA radio telescope were used to examine the innermost region of Comet 46P/Wirtanen, nicknamed the Christmas comet because in recent days it made an Earth flyby. This expression has to be considered in a broad sense since it reached 11.6 million kilometers (more than 7 million miles) on December 16. This was enough to obtain interesting information such as the detection of hydrogen cyanide molecules in its nucleus by ALMA.

Artist's concept of a star with a violent flare (Image Casey Reed/NASA)

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports the detection of a powerful stellar flare generated by the young star cataloged as NGTS J121939.5-355557 or more simply as NGTS J1219-3555. A team of astronomers used the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescope array in Chile to observe a rare event that could be important for exoplanet formation in a system that is still in formation.

The Abell S1063 galaxy cluster (Image NASA, ESA, and M. Montes (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia))

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a new method to detect and map the dark matter existing in galaxy clusters with a higher precision than those used so far. Mireia Montes of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Ignacio Trujillo of the Canary Islands Institute of Astronomy, Spain, exploited the so-called intracluster light, the faint light within galaxy clusters produced by their interaction, detected in the Hubble Frontier Fields program, to map the distribution of dark matter within them.

2018 VG18, nicknamed Farout, is the object farthest from the Sun within the solar system

A team of astronomers announced the discovery of the celestial body farthest from the Sun within the solar system. Cataloged as 2018 VG18 and nicknamed Farout, it was discovered by astronomers specializing in the search for Kuiper Belt Objects including the one nicknamed The Goblin, announced in October 2018. 2018 VG18 is much further away, currently at a distance from the Sun estimated around 120 times the Earth’s.