An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research that provides an explanation for an astronomical mystery dating back to the 1970s. A team of researchers of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in Amsterdam led by Jakob van den Eijnden discovered a gap in the accretion disk of the binary system MXB 1730-335, known as Rapid Burster for its rapid and discontinuous X-ray flashes.

A photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula showing the agony of a low-mass star like the Sun. This nebula is also known by the nickname Rotten Egg Nebula because its study revealed that in the gas surrounding it there’s a high concentration of sulfur, the element that causes the characteristic rotten egg smell.

Two articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describing research on as many pulsar that allow to better understand the geometry of the plasma in their vicinity. Two independent team used NASA’s Chandra space telescope to study the pulsar Geminga, also known as PSR B0633+17, and PSR B0355+54 gathering information on the nebulas of high-energy particles called in jargon plerions generated by the pulsars.

At the 229th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society held recently, astronomers of the SDSS/APOGEE project announced the results of a study that included more than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way. Each star was analyzed to determine the amount of nearly two dozen chemical elements, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, the ones that form life’s building blocks.