Telescopes

A comparison between the Sun, a low mass star, a brown dwarf, Jupiter and the Earth (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCB)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes a study of the brown dwarfs that should be present in the cosmic neighborhood. A team of astronomers from the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Germany, re-analyzed data from observations and cataloging of the brown dwarfs less than six and a half parsecs from Earth and concluded that there should be more of them and maybe we haven’t found them yet.

Artistic illustration of the Kepler Space Telescope (Image NASA)

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NASA announced that it succeeded in restoring the Kepler space telescope after a few days it entered Emergency Mode. The mission’s engineers restored the communications during the last Sunday but the time table to resume its work is still to be determined. Communications also made it possible to start downloading telemetry and event data to determine the causes of the emergency.

The galaxy NGC 1600 with a close-up in the inset taken by Hubble (Image NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI))

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of one of the biggles black holes found so far. Using data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, an international team of astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole with a mass estimated at around 17 billion times the Sun in the galaxy NGC 1600. It’s an extraordinary mass considering that it’s inside a galaxy very large but fairly isolated.

The Andromeda galaxy with the pulsar's signal in the inset (Image Andromeda: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/J. Fritz, U. Gent/XMM-Newton/EPIC/W. Pietsch, MPE; data: P. Esposito et al (2016))

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the discovery of the first pulsar in the Andromeda galaxy. A team led by Paolo Esposito of INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, Milan, Italy, found this elusive object using the archives of observations made with ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope.

The supernova G1.9+0.3 (Image NASA/CXC/CfA/S. Chakraborti et al.)

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An article published in “Astrophysical Journal” describes the analysis of the supernova remnant G1.9+0.3, the youngest observed in the Milky Way. A team of astronomers from Harvard University used data collected by NASA’s Chandra space telescope and the VLA radio telescope to find evidence that it’s an explosion triggered by the merger of two white dwarfs, what is called a Type Ia supernova.