Telescopes

Artist's impression of ‘Oumuamua with its emissions (Image ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua whose authors believe that after all it’s a comet as its discoverers initially thought. A team of researchers led by Marco Micheli from the ESA SSA-NEO Coordination Center in Frascati, Italy, used observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope and various ground-based telescopes to follow ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory finding that it was different from the one calculated taking into account the various gravitational influences. The conclusion is that there’s a cometary activity that generates an additional boost.

The TMC1A system

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the discovery that dust particles in a disk surrounding a protostar start coagulating even before the star has completed its formation. A team of researchers used the ALMA radio telescope to study the system in formation TMC1A noting the lack of radiation from carbon monoxide near the protostar. Their conclusion is that large dust particles are blocking those radiations, an important discovery because it means that in the disk of gas and dust the processes that will lead to the formation of planets have already begun.

MRK 1216

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An article to be published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research on isolated galaxies with a mass similar to the first elliptical galaxies but much smaller in which the central supermassive black hole inhibited stellar formation and grew more than normal. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to examine the galaxies MRK 1216 and PGC 032873, nicknamed red nuggets, relics of the first massive galaxies that formed in the first billion years after the Big Bang.

Artist's concept of the blazar OJ 287

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research on a blazar, a type of active galactic nucleus, known as OJ 287. A team of researchers led by Silke Britzen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, studied this blazar, which has long been known and left the astronomers puzzled by its variations in brightness. The cause could be in the presence of two black holes or a misaligned accretion disk.

The galaxy ESO325-G004 and the Einstein ring (Image ESO, ESA/Hubble, NASA)

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An article published in the journal “Science” describes the most precise verification of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity outside the Milky Way. A team of researchers led by Thomas Collett of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the British University of Portsmouth used data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s VLT to observe a gravitational lensing effect, one of the relativistic predictions, created by the galaxy ESO325-G004. The two instruments provided separate data that, compared, confirmed the correctness of the theory.