Stars

A moment of the July 24, 2016 solar flare (Image NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Joy Ng, producer/IRIS/Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory)

NASA released the images captured by its IRIS space probe that show a kind of rain that fell on the Sun on July 24, 2016. This event occurred during a mid-level solar flare that led to the ejection of solar material, plasma at very high temperatures which then fell like rain and for this reason is called coronal rain or in more technical jargon post-flare loops.

DEM L316A seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (Image ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu)

A photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the remains of a star that died long ago. Those are wisps of ionized gas that still emit a faint glow, the last product of the immense energy generated in a Type Ia supernova. These supernova remnants called DEM L316A are located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, about 160,000 light-years away from Earth.

Artistic representation of the star CX330 and the disk of gas and dust surrounding it (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research of an object called CX330 which for some years has been mysterious and was later found to be a young star. A group of researchers led by Chris Britt of Texas Tech University used data collected from NASA’s Chandra and WISE space telescopes and others to determine its nature. It remains unclear why CX330 is so isolated.

Artistic concept of two exoplanets transiting in front of the TRAPPIST-1 star (Image NASA/ESA/STScI/J. de Wit (MIT))

An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on two exoplanets of the TRAPPIST-1 system. A group of researchers led by Julien de Wit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts used the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to better examine two of the three exoplanets whose discovery was announced in May 2016.

Artistic concept of the V883 Orionis system with its protoplanetary disc and the snow in it (Image A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the first observation ever of the water snow line in the V883 Orionis system. Using the ALMA radio telescope, a team led by Lucas Cieza of the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile, identified the distance from the star beyond which the temperature drops enough for water to freeze.