Planets

Artist's concept of the panorama on the planet TRAPPIST-1f (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC))

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research into the possible migration of the orbits of the 7 planets of the ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1’s system and their composition. A team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and Vanderbilt University put together the information available on that system to perform a series of calculations concluding that the planets formed much farther away from their star from their current positions and that some of them have a very high water content, paradoxically too much for them to be habitable.

The possible ancient oceans of Mars (Image courtesy Robert Citron images, UC Berkeley. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the oceans that formed on Mars when the planet was young. A team of geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley provided what are believed to be evidence of a connection between those oceans’ formation and the volcanic system of the Tharsis region, the largest of the solar system, which might have warmed the surface enough to keep water liquid for a long time.

Crater Juling (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/ASI/INAF)

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Two articles published in the journal “Science Advances” describe two researches connected in different ways but linked to the presence of water on the dwarf planet Ceres. Two teams of researchers, but with many members in common, led by scientists from the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Rome, Italy, used observations made by the VIR spectrometer on board NASA’s Dawn space probe to find evidence of the presence of ice of water in Crater Juling and to map the distribution of carbonates, salts whose origin is linked to the presence of liquid water, on Ceres.

Illustration of exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” shows the confirmation of 15 exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs. A team of researchers led by Teruyuki Hirano from the Tokyo Institute of Technology used data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and follow-up observations. Another article in the same journal focuses on 3 confirmed super-Earths including K2-155d, which could be in ​​its system’s habitable zone.

Cyclones at Jupiter's north pole (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM)

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Four articles published in the journal “Nature” describe as many researches on the planet Jupiter. Different teams of researchers focused on different phenomena using data collected by NASA’s Juno space probe. The researches concerns groups of huge cyclones present in Jupiter’s polar regions, wind flows that extend up to thousands of kilometers of depth, the stripes of the atmosphere that rotate at different speeds and the asymmetries in the planet’s gravitational field.