An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the planet GJ 436b, whose orbit around its star turned out to be almost polar instead of equatorial. A team of researchers led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE)Switzerland, discovered this strange new characteristic of this exoplanet’s orbit, already known because its orbit is very eccentric and above all because it has a huge tail similar to a comet’s.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes the results of a spectroscopic analysis and thermal modeling of the interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua. A team of astronomers led by Professor Alan Fitzsimmons and Dr. Michele Bannister from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast concluded that, due to its exposure to cosmic rays, a superficial layering of organic and insulating materials occurred on the asteroid and it might contain ice.
At a press conference, the annoucement came of the first exoplanets discovered thanks to the TensorFlow machine learning engine created by Google. Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained this system to make it recognize exoplanets in the data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The two exoplanets announced are Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g but it’s only the beginning for a new way to look for exoplanets, especially the smaller ones that leave very weak traces.
An article published in the journal “Science” describes a precise measurement of the magnetic field of the corona of the black hole V404 Cygni. A team of researchers used the data collected in 2015 during a violent outburst of energy connected to the emission of jets from the black hole detected at many wavelengths using various space and ground-based telescopes. The result of this measurement was very surprising, being about 400 times lower than previous estimates.
Two articles, one published in the journal “Nature” and one published in the “Astrophysical Journal Letters”, describe different aspects of a research that led to the discovery of the oldest known supermassive black hole. According to an estimate it formed about 690 million years after the Big Bang and it’s difficult to explain how it reached 800 million times the Sun’s mass. Labeled as Ulas J134208.10+092838.61 or more simply as J1342+0928, it may have formed during the so-called reionization period.
