An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of a triple system in formation. An international team of scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes to observe the system called L1448 IRS3B, where a disk of dust and gas is fragmenting into a multiple star system.
An article to be published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes an investigation into the glowing gas clouds around distant quasars. An international team of astronomers led by a group at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland, used the MUSE instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to look at very distant galaxies that are active, of the type called quasar, and discovered that the gas halos that surround them are more common than expected.
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the creation of a map of neutral atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way. An international team of scientists put together data collected by two of the largest steerable radio telescopes in the world, the 100-m Max-Planck radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany and the 64-m CSIRO radio telescope in Parkes, Australia.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes the discovery of the relics of an ancient globular cluster in the Milky Way’s central area. A team of astronomers led by Dante Minniti (Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile) and Rodrigo Contreras Ramos (Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile) used observations from the “Variables in the Via Lactea with VISTA” (VVV) survey carried out with ESO’s VISTA telescope to discover the ancient stars of type RR Lyrae for the first time in that area.
David Gerdes, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Michigan, and a number of colleagues associated with the DES (Dark Energy Survey) survey have discovered a new dwarf planet that currently has a distance of about 14 billion kilometers (about 8.5 billion miles) from the Sun. Called for now just 2014 UZ224, it’s among the most distant celestial bodies discovered in the solar system after the dwarf planet Eris and the possible dwarf planet known as V774104 whose discovery was announced in December 2015.
