Between April 28 and 29, 2015 a solar flare produced a filament that spread to a really huge distance. The result is that the images of the space probe SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) that captured the filament, to include it cover a wide area of 45 million kilometers (about 30 million miles).
On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery was launched in its STS-31 mission. In its cargo bay, it carried a really special payload, the Hubble Space Telescope. The day after it was deployed in its orbit, just over 550 km (about 342 miles) altitude. On June 25, Hubble sent its first images, which revealed a flaw in its primary mirror that reduced its usefulness. The first of a series of service missions turned what had threatened to turn into a terrible failure into a symbol for science and technology that goes far beyond astronomy.
ESA’s space probe Rosetta identified new jets of gas and dust emerge from the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The images were taken using the OSIRIS camera on March 12, 2015 and were presented last week during EGU2015 (European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2015) in Vienna. The activity on the comet keeps on increasing but it took some luck to detect new jets.
When astronomers started studying a map of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB or CMBR), the residue of the earliest stages of the universe, they found what was called the Cold Spot. That’s a huge area colder than expected which could be the largest single cosmic structure never identified. According to an international team of scientists consists of a cosmic supervoid which about 1.8 billion light years across.
A research conducted by a team led by astronomer Peter A. Milne of the University of Arizona published in two articles in the “Astrophysical Journal” shows that Type Ia supernovae can be divided into two groups with different characteristics. For years, astronomers had thought that their brightness depended almost exclusively on their distance. This can have consequences on our knowledge of the universe expansion, also calculated based on this type of supernovae.
