Stars

Image of the Medusa Nebula captures using the VLT telescope (Image ESO)

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The most detailed image ever obtained of the Medusa Nebula was taken using ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) in Chile. It reveals in a much better way the filaments of glowing gas that make it up. Those are snake-like filaments that led to the nickname Medusa with which is commonly known, inspired by the myth of the creature with snakes in place of hair. This nebula shows what might happen to the Sun some billion years in the future.

Image of the HL Tauri system taken by the ALMA telescope (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

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Last October a picture of the system HL Tauri captured by ESO’s ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array) telescope was published. It showed a disk of dust that is slowly coalescing and was one of the sharpest images ever made at sumbillimetric wavelengths. According to many scientists there are planets that are forming in the system but others were skeptical and that created a debate. Now a team of astrophysicists from the University of Toronto led by Daniel Tamayo brought new evidence that there really are planets forming, published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal”.

Images of the April 28-29, 2015 solar filament captured by the SOHO space probe's coronographs (Image ESA/NASA/SOHO)

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Between April 28 and 29, 2015 a solar flare produced a filament that spread to a really huge distance. The result is that the images of the space probe SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) that captured the filament, to include it cover a wide area of ​​45 million kilometers (about 30 million miles).

On the left, a common Supernova with no engine, on the right a Supernova with a strong engine that emits a gamma-ray burst, in the middle an intermediate case such as SN 2012ap (Image Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

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An article published in “Astrophysical Journal” describes the diskovery made by a group of astronomers led by Sayan Chakraborti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). They studied a supernova called 2012ap (SN 2012ap) which is a missing link between ordinary ones and the ones that cause the emission of a gamma-ray burst.