Planets

Artist's concept of the star RZ Piscium surrounded by blobs of gas and dust (Image NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab)

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” describes a research on the young star RZ Piscium that offers an explanation for the strange variations of its brightness. A team of astronomers used detections made with ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, the Shane telescope at Lick Observatory in California and the Keck I telescope at W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii concluding that probably RZ Piscium is destroying at least some planets in its star system or two gas-rich planets collided.

Artist's concept of the planet GJ 436b with its tail (Image courtesy Mark Garlick/University of Warwick)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the planet GJ 436b, whose orbit around its star turned out to be almost polar instead of equatorial. A team of researchers led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE)Switzerland, discovered this strange new characteristic of this exoplanet’s orbit, already known because its orbit is very eccentric and above all because it has a huge tail similar to a comet’s.

Comparison between the Kepler-90 system and the solar system (Image NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel)

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At a press conference, the annoucement came of the first exoplanets discovered thanks to the TensorFlow machine learning engine created by Google. Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained this system to make it recognize exoplanets in the data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The two exoplanets announced are Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g but it’s only the beginning for a new way to look for exoplanets, especially the smaller ones that leave very weak traces.

Simulated perspective view of Occator Crater on Ceres (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

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At the annual American Geophysical Union meeting, NASA scientists presented the results of the latest research on bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. In particular, the activity detected over time, especially by NASA’s Dawn space probe with variations in their brightness confirm the possibility that on Ceres there’s still a geological activity that is modifying this dwarf planet’s surface.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot' layers (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI)

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Yesterday at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting the new discoveries concerning Jupiter’s Great Red Spot of Jupiter and a new ​​radiation area were announced. The data collected by NASA’s space probe Juno during a flyby on July 11, 2017 allowed to discover something new about that storm bigger than Earth, for example finding an answer to one of the crucial questions about it establishing that it’s about 300 kilometers (200 miles) deep.