An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” presents maps and a catalog of compact sources obtained thanks to a project called Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL). The observations made during the ESA Herschel Space Telescope’s mission were used to create maps of the complete Plan Galactic in the far infrared with a level of completeness never seen before.
The Japanese space agency JAXA analyzed the data collected on its Hitomi Space Telescope, formerly known as Astro-H, to try to understand the reasons why only sporadic signals got received from the satellite since March 26. The most plausible hypothesis is that it lost its attitude because of some invalid data and its maneuvering thrusters didn’t correct the problem due to unsuitable settings. The perspective is grim but there are still hopes to save Hitomi.
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.
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.
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.
