An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” describes a research on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. Using infrared observations carried out with the SOFIA observatory a team of scientists of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, SETI and NASA’s JPL identified the presence of pyroxene, clay and carbonates that so far deceived the researchers, who thought the surface was rich in carbon compounds.
Two articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describing research on as many pulsar that allow to better understand the geometry of the plasma in their vicinity. Two independent team used NASA’s Chandra space telescope to study the pulsar Geminga, also known as PSR B0633+17, and PSR B0355+54 gathering information on the nebulas of high-energy particles called in jargon plerions generated by the pulsars.
The first images of the Sun generated by observations carried out using the ALMA radio telescope have been published. This is the first time that the largest radio telescope in the world has been used in this way and this is the beginning of an important expansion in ALMA’s use. The first results are details of the Sun’s chromosphere such as a sunspot twice the size of Earth.
At the 229th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society held recently, astronomers of the SDSS/APOGEE project announced the results of a study that included more than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way. Each star was analyzed to determine the amount of nearly two dozen chemical elements, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, the ones that form life’s building blocks.
A photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy RX J1140.1+0307 and apparently it’s a spiral galaxy like there are a lot, including the Milky Way. However, normally these galaxies have at their center a supermassive black hole, instead RX J1140.1+0307 has a smaller, intermediate-mass black hole. This is an anomaly and astronomers are looking for an explanation.
