NASA

Artist's concept of a neutron star (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An article published in “Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes a research, also presented recently at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, about the pulsar known as PSR J1119-6127. Discovered over 16 years ago, recently it showed behaviors typical of a magnetar, a different type of neutron star. This oddity might help explain the link between pulsars and magnetars and the evolution of neutron stars.

Perspective view of the area near Rembrandt basin compared to a photo (Image NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/DLR/Smithsonian Institution.)

An article published in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters” describes the discovery of a great valley on the planet Mercury. A team of scientists led by Thomas R. Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. used topographic maps created thanks to NASA’s MESSENGER space probe to discover it. It’s considered evidence of the planet’s contraction.

The Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft blasting off atop a Soyuz Rocket (Photo NASA/Bill Ingalls)

It was night in Kazakhstan when the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Peggy Whitson, Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet to ransport them to the International Space Station. It’s the third new version Soyuz spacecraft and was launched once again in the route that will take two days instead of the six-hourt fast path to keep on testing the new on-board systems.

Illustration of OGLE-2015-BLG-1319: in grey the data from ground-based telescopes, in blue the data from Swift and in red the data from Spitzer (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An article published in “Astrophysical Journal” describes the study of a brown dwarf that orbits a K-type star that was possible thanks to a gravitational microlensing event. An international team of astronomers used NASA’s Swift and Spitzer space telescopes to take advantage of that event, cataloged as OGLE-2015-BLG-1319, at a distance from its star that at which few of those objects were found, hence the name brown dwarf desert.